Our Resources for History This Year

This year for history we decided to do an in depth study of the Middle Ages. I made this decision for a couple of reasons. One we had really not studied it very much of the years and Two we had so many books on the shelves about this time period that it was just screaming at us to do it. Our main spine is Famous Men of the Middle Ages which we got for free for the Kindle and the study guide that goes along with it from Cyndy Shearer which was purchased at a used book sale a couple of years ago. So far in the Famous Men book we studied:

The Gods of the Teutons

Alaric the Visigoth

Attila the Hun

Genseric the Vandal

Theodoric the Ostrogoth

Clovis

Justinian the Great

Benedict and Gregory

Mohammed

Charles Martel and Pepin

Charlemagne

Harun - al - Rashid

I have also included books from our shelves from this time period and some that are recommended from the study guide. We read many excerpts from The Children of Odin which Grace loved because of her love for Thor and Loki, but learned that the gods were all pretty selfish and very similar to the mythology of the Greeks. We also finished A Door in the Wall and are currently working our way through Adam of the Road. 

I had Grace pick one of the Famous Men we have learned about so far to write a more in depth paper about and she picked Mohammed. We have five more books to read alongside the other famous men we will be learning about over this school year. 

I love putting our own study together as opposed to buying a complete curriculum or textbook. This way we can follow any rabbit trails that we wish and tweak all the books and such to suit our needs. On a side note I choose King Alfred's English to use as part of Grace's 9th grade English credit and it fits very nicely with the study of Medieval History. Currently we are in the section about Middle English. Oh yes, I can't forget that we have also started reading Beowulf. I will probably have her do some type of illustration or book report on Beowulf because it is just so fascinating.