Planning for 9th Grade Part 2

History for 9th grade will center around the spine book of Famous Men of the Middle Ages. I picked up the Greenleaf study guide to the Famous Men book at a used book sale a few years ago and knew at some point that I wanted to use it. I am ashamed to say that over all these years we have studied very little about the Middle Ages or Medieval Times. The study guide is broken down into 34 chapters. We will accomplish one lesson a week which should finish us up by the end of the school year. Each lesson contains vocabulary work, questions to answer, other resources to utilize, map work, and charts to fill out. I was able to snag Famous Men of the Middle Ages free on Kindle as well as two other books we will use to accompany this unit. The only other book I need to purchase for this study that is used routinely throughout the study is The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History. I will order it in late July.

To have enough work to create a whole credit for history this year I have added a few other activities to the yearly schedule. Four times during the year I will ask Grace to select a person of interest from the studies to research further and write or type a two page paper on. Also she will be required to present two oral presentations on something that was invented in the Middle Ages.

The accompanying book list for this study which will be used as read alouds are:

• The Door in the Wall
• Adam of the Road
• King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table
• Ivanhoe
• Sir Knight of the Splendid Way
• The Children of Odin
• Otto of the Silver Hand

The above list of books will be read aloud by me daily Monday - Friday with the exception of Tuesday. I enjoy the books as much as Grace if not more. So I like to include at least two books a day that we use as read alouds. This year that will be history and church history. She will be responsible for her science literature books.

Another history credit we will start working on is Early Church History. I intend for us to work through the 12 books from Salem Ridge Press about early church history. We will read 4 books a year. By the end of her senior year we will have finished the 12 book series and hopefully reached close to 150 hours for a credit in the subject. I will also ask Grace to fill out a book report form after each book is finished. We originally became intrigued with this series of books when we did a review of one for the TOS Review Crew. You can find the review here - Margarethe. So the 4 books on tap for this year are:

• Glaucia The Greek Slave
• The Captives
• Out of the Mouth of the Lion
• Sowing Beside All Waters

We will read 10 pages a day from these books Monday - Friday with the exception of Tuesday to finish them all up by the end of the school year. Tuesday is co-op day and I am scheduling very little in the morning on Tuesdays.