Mapping out the Middle Ages

We will begin the next season of schooling here the end of this week, with a jaunt thru the Middle Ages. We have an interest here with knights, castles, Robin Hood and King Arthur's legends so I'm planning out the next year to focus on this time frame.
I am totally not above exploiting a current interest for the sake of schooling!

So, for the past few weeks I have been browsing websites and book lists, printing reams of pages for lengthy lapbook and notebook selections, organizing our necessary readers here at home, downloading free resources to iBooks and our Kindle app, and browsing used books for deals on good books to use this next season. I have been to AmblesideOnline, Tanglewood Curriculum We will utilize the idea of notebooking and lapbooking for the majority of our work this year. With a topic like Medieval Times, we probably won't stick to conventional lapbooking though, and will put together a mutated version combining the best of both styles.  I am looking at inexpensive artist sketch books for our notebook foundation. If I can't find them on the cheap, we will probably just go with bulk cardstock or cover stock paper and 3-hole them into binders.

I have now re-organized our main school shelves to accommodate our resources, loaded several large binders with print-outs ready for use, set up the work boxes to organize the daily work, and I am hoping to find goodies to decorate our bulletin board as well.



So...what are our plans? Varied, of course, with my range of ages from 6yo up to 14yo. My main helper day to day will be my right hand, 17yo daughter. Here's our general layout...

Bible
Calvary Children's Ministry lessons, 1-2 lessons/week, keeping the subject together
Understanding Charlotte a CM blog has some reading plans already laid out as well We will probably pick up with these and notebook/illustrate each reading for our notebooks
Amblesideonline's Hymn Study, 1/week
Little Folded Hands, Prayers for Children for memory work and skills

Math/Grammar
Our core in these areas has been Rod and Staff texts for the past handful of years, and we're not making any changes there. I do go back and forth using Ray's Arithmetic and the original 1836 version of McGuffey Readers for supplement and quiz work though. Dollar Homeschool has a good price for the entire eclectic education series' (Rays, McGuffey, Harvey's, Thalheimer's and Norton's) all contained in CD form.
We always find bits and pieces online to pad out our lessons and supply extra work or just fun work, such as here
In addition to this, we have spelling daily, and the middles do a lesson in Apples daily.
We will be reading thru Poems Every Child Should Know, 1/week plus illustrating it for our notebooks. This will work into copywork as well.



History
This will be our spine this year, our main reading to lead our Middle Ages study and lapbooking season. Our core texts will be An Island Story, 2 chapters/week on Mondays and Wednesdays, A Child's History of England, 1 chapter/week on Tuesdays, and Story of the World v2, 1 chapter/week on Thursdays.
Our lapbook and notebooking resources have come from all over the Internet. Great sites like HomeschoolShare and Dynamic2Moms filled my lapbook binder, I've been bookmarking all manner of Medieval Times websites, information on castles, knights, and more. I'm sure we won't use all of them, but I'm all about the over-kill :-)

Geography
We'll do as we usually do and map our the locations and such thru our reading. With a spine taking us thru The British Empire of old as they really grew their roots, we will have plenty to do. Our study starts with the Vikings so we will hit the gate running with plenty of adventures in mapping.

Science/Nature Study
We will be using a 2 week unit study approach this year to the animal kingdom at large. Everything from worms, butterflies, wasps, spiders, snakes, bears, turtles, ocean life, and exotic rain forest creatures. Our unit on birds will most likely stretch out to at least 4 weeks, as will the ocean life. Padded out, this should last us all season (36-40 weeks).
This has since changed in the plans. We really enjoyed using God's Marvelous Works (Rod & Staff) last year, so we are going ahead with God's Marvelous Works book 2 this year. There are 4 units for the year, covering 30 lessons. We will study thru Algae and Fungi, Mammals, Sponges, Mollusks, Sea Worms and Jellies, and Amphibians. We will take 1 week to study each lesson, making notebook.lapbook pages and so forth. The unit of Mammals will most likely pad us out an extra 6-8 weeks to complete the entire year.

We will continue along with reading lessons using AlphaPhonics, Word Mastery and 100 Easy Lessons. Here are the great worksheets for the lessons in 100 Easy Lessons, from Donna Young (also a great site for just about every single thing you can think of for planning and organizing your school year!)

We will work on handicrafts and other projects that tie into our time frame, such as stained glass 'windows' and maybe a chain mail project.

And now, the book list. It's definitely not all-inclusive, but I have browsed around, and these suit our interests nicely. I am using as many free, online or downloadable texts as I can find, but we will purchase a few books (used) to add to our library here. For our own library, I try to locate inexpensive hardcover volumes to keep.

Henty has a great assortment for us, including:
In Freedom's Cause
Winning His Spurs
St. George for England
A Knight of the White Cross
The Dragon and the Raven
The Boy Knight
At Agincourt
Wulf the Saxon
Ivanhoe, Walter Scott
H.E. Marshall books free online, Baldwin Project has so many good titles to read online
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Howard Pyle
Otto of the Silver Hand, Howard Pyle
Stories of King Arthur's Knights as Told to the Children, Mary MacGregor
King Arthur and His Knights, Maude L. Radford
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain
Viking Tales, Jennie Hall
Viking Adventures, Clyde Robert Bulla
The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights, Sir James Knowles
Legends of the Middle Ages, Hèlène Adeline Guerber
Sir George and the Dragon
Harald and the Stag
Miss Frizzle's Medieval Adventures
Castle, Robert Macaulay
Robin Hood
Knights of the Round Table
The Usborne Book of Castles
The Door in the Wall
The Kitchen Knight
50 Hands-on Activities for Knights and Castles
Days of Knights and Damsels activity guide
In the Days of William the Conqueror
When Knights were Bold
King Arthur and His Knights
The Knights of the Silver Shield


Other Resources we may utilize:
Storm The Castle has a great list of projects we will definitely be putting into the works here during the year! There are catapults, shields and masks, swords if you're interested, diorama projects and so much more. Thank you Eddie for the heads-up in the comments! We would have missed this great addition! edited addition 8/3
History.com site for The Middle Ages
A Book in Time, Middle Ages
A Book in Time, World History reading list
Chronicles of The Earth blog  Story of the World and lapbook resources Story of the World V2 Resources
Busy Bee Kids Crafts
Middle Ages Games and Activities
Mr Donn's Middle Ages links
Webtech Middle Ages
Sacred Heart of Jesus Academy has a nice collection of book ideas for Middle Ages
Learning Adventures Curriculum, Collection of info pages
Kickbutt Crazy Lapbooks page for Medieval Times
Mattman's Arthurian Resources
Paula's Archives Literature to Supplement History
History for Kids, Middle Ages Projects
AtoZ Kids Stuff pages
Castle craft project, younger levels
Britain Express Medieval History
England in the Middle Ages 
The Middle Ages, Chivalry, and Knighthood
Classical Homeschooling's History on the Internet list
Viking Network Ireland, The Vikings
a great school page on The Middle Ages
Lady of Shallot poem, Alfred Lord Tennyson
King Arthur and the Knights of The Round Table information
Interactives The Middle Ages
Travel to The Days of Old  These pages are from Beacon Learning, there are a lot of lessons to glean from here
FunSchooling Unit Study Archives, Kings, Queens, and Castles
Listmania! list of Kid's Books for Middle Ages and all ages books on Middle Ages

On another note, just for great reading, Classic Reader Online has a lot of good reading in various genres free, online. There is also FullBooks.com, but I haven't checked that one out much yet.


Many titles are available free online thru resources like Project Gutenburg, Baldwin Project, archive.org, and other free text sites, with some available as audio reads as well. Where I could, we utilized these free resources and downloaded them for reading via iBooks or Kindle. Definitely don't go by just my suggestions here for book locations...Google them for yourself and find the source that suits your own needs best.

Ambitious, I know. We will never read everything, but with so many great titles available free online, how could I refuse to load them up just in case we need more free reading fun? I love having too many options than coming up short. There are far more titles and resources available out there than I've listed here. So many great bloggers have been thru the Middle Ages and have lots of notes, ideas, and projects to share. If anyone finds any blog  notes out there, please do share here in the comments!


- Blessings from Abundant Blessings Homestead!

PP: On The Banks of Plum Creek

According to the Primer, we will begin to dig a bit deeper into nature with things like classifications: plant, animal, fungi, protista, and monera.

Kingdoms are divided into a classification’s pattern from the largest to the smallest categories. As an example, the animal kingdom categories are: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species.  Each plant or animal is specifically identified by its genus and species name. This is called binomial nomenclature.

Whew….ok, I was never a big science major I’m afraid.  I know alot more than I realize I know, but still… Here are some varied websites you might find useful in planning through this book

Our favorite find: Sorting and Classifying Organisms for Kids

Kingdom to Subphylum

Experimental Biosciences introductory pages

The (Modern) Six Kingdom Classification  this would be a decent chart to print for a notebook or lapbook

Kids Biology site using an example of classifying candy. Another good page in the Kids Biology site

We will also be putting out Considering God’s Creation workbook and teacher guide to use.

 

Also touched on for some extra study, the grasshopper plagues between 1873-1877. 

We will work on our study using our favorite must-have homeschooling resource for science, The Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock.  You can download it free here, but I definitely suggest getting a copy of your own.

Also, you might want to get the Outdoor Series over at the Handbook of Nature Study Blog.  Barb has an incredible collection of goodies shared, some free, some in her great ebook form.

 

Our Memory Work for this book is Psalm 51.

Other activities include:

reading a biography of Noah Webster

making a 9-patch quilt

a study of trees

water safety

tobacco, use, cancers related to tobacco

learning about Bees, Moths, Butterflies, Mammals in general, leeches, beavers, leeches and their old time medical uses,

preserving fruit by dehydration

learning about water purification

a study of Plains for geography

the history and origin of American Folk Songs

crafting window stars

 

Some of our study words include:

conduction, convection, radiation, butte, mesa, plateau, plain, preservation, idleness (both a dictionary definition, as well as using our Strong’s Concordance, and For Instruction in Righteousness books), knoll, snipe, belfry, cravat and more.  We generally add any word that is new to the children to their on-going list.

Some Links to Share

National Geographic Coloring Pages....we are putting these to use as we can with our Paths curriculum nature portions 
And more here at Grandparents.com site...
Bird coloring pages...
Jim Arnosky has a set of pages as well...and his famous Crinkleroot
Edupicks has some good pictures as well...

And some butterfly pages, perfect for putting together a fun lapbook or notebooking pages
And Plants lapbook/notebooking pages

lots of Nature coloring pages

Barb/Harmony Arts Mom has a great Squidoo lens on Autumn...artistic links and all

Cornell"s Bird pages are excellent...they even have a Home Study in Bird Biology course you can order

Animal Tracks...they are very interested in tracking skills after reading about the Shadow Wolves

lessons on drawing nature (or anything really) with your children...and here...and Nature Friend magazine  We have a subscription to Artistic Nature thru CurrClick and absolutely LOVE it...
Writing Field Notes in your nature journal and here...

and my favorite for notebooking pages...NotebookingPages.com and their great Treasury pages of freebies!

Jamestown Gathering is Done...Olders, Youngers and Mom (and lapbooking talk)

I know...you and I both know that the word "done" in my vocabulary is just a filler sort of word.  I'm never really done with a unit...I tweak repeatedly.

However, for the most part, should I never touch another computer search bar, we are way beyond prepared for boarding a ship to Jamestown here.  The Paths of Exploration curriculum is already complete as it stands, but for fun, I started searching through all the goodies offered up along the trail, and we put together some resources outside of what they offer.  That's the fun of homeschooling anyway, right?  Of course, this is all just extra work for me...because as of this week, they have their lapbooking packs available for the Paths volumes as well.

So, really, I've just pulled resources and lapbook goodies together for nothing....but I had fun. Even if I am a bit bug-eyed and carpal-tunnel-ated from all the computer roaming.

I have not pulled together pages for all the various mammals, birds, trees and such that are discussed, or would be fun to search out during this lesson.  The list is just too full and my arms are just too tired :o)  I will hunt for those as we come to them.  I will share a bit of what we are researching as we go along each week, starting toward the end of this month. I will be posting things at least a week in advance of our actually using them, and if you have any resources, interesting pages or book ideas that we don't cover, please let me know so I can check them out before we are ready for them.

With the Paths unit, we are really only working math and English from our Rod & Staff curriculum.  Reading is amply covered in Paths, as well as the various resources I am pulling in, so aside from our Word Mastery or Learning to Read/100 Easy Lessons for the youngers, our full school day is Bible, Math, English, Spanish and Sign Language (a couple times a week) and Paths of Exploration.  Geography, history, writing/copywork/narrations/reports, arts and crafts, science, nature study....these are all well-covered with Paths.  I would like to incorporate some "outdoor survival" skills into the studies as well (we are planning to read Sign of The Beaver as our pm reading...maybe even do Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson again, though I thing SFR would work in better later, history-era wise).

The olders will come into the picture from a wider view, reading additional resources focusing on the governmental and civic issues, as well as the religious foundations of the era, besides just main points of American History itself.  There are several resources available through Vision Forum I would like to get for this. I would really like to get this set of American History lectures from them, but we'll see.

The youngest of the group will be worked in with their own lapbook work on alot of the same topics as the "targeted" grade levels are, but honestly, I have a wide variety of ages/grade here with 8 children schooling and no one set of lapbook/notebook units is going to fit everyone across the board.  So, we tweak.  The littles (almost 6yo, 4yo) will be working on the same nature and science goodies, they will get coloring pages and card game fun with Jamestown, pilgrims, Mayflower, Indians etc. to do, they will have similar lapbooks to do, just geared a bit differently than the layout of the curriculum itself.  We love reading, so they will enjoy a coloring page while we read our chapters.  The lapbook "pieces" can help with motor skills like cutting, they will do some printing and lots of coloring.

I have some lapbooks here aleady, and we will see what elements we can pull from them...most of them came free or very inexpensive, through CurrClick and the like.  We have a 17th and 18th Century Life unit, several History Scribes, ideas from Squidoo, HomeschoolShare, a Wordpress blog on Lapbooking (I really like this one...it will be a definite go-to resource!), Lapbook Lessons at Ning, Lapbook Lessons blog, and Homeschool Helper Online, among others.

I know there are alot of folks on the Lapbook bandwagon and I'm merely a late-bloomer with it all, but I'm excited.  If you have children who like projects, hands-on schoolwork, and so on, I don't see why you aren't already lapbooking.  There doesn't have to be a great deal of money spent on fancy unit kits, lapbook bundles, clipart and so forth.  There are just too many free units already laid out, and far too many resources available online to say you can't do it.  And lapbooks are a great way to incorporate several age groups together on similar topics.  Look at us -- we have 17yo, 14yo, 12yo,10yo, 8yo, 7yo, 5yo and 4 yo (give or take, as everyone is about to change-over with a birthday...) all schooling together and we'll be doing alot of notebooking and lapbooking with our units coming up!!

What are you waiting for???

Note/Lap Booking Resources: templates, supplies, and more!

Templates by Donovan looks to be a promising add on to my growing list of resources!

and a basics and more list of supplies to have handy for notebooking adventures...

Today's Homeschool Freebie Resource

The blog, Just Us, has shared several notebooking and lapbooking pages.  They are featured as today's resource over at Homeschool Freebie of The Day.

We looked through some of their pages and it is certainly a resource I will return to many times.  There are some good American Revolution resources shared, with notebook pages, lapbook components, and pages for using Johnny Tremain in your reading. 

There are pages on book ideas for studying early American History and Explorers I've already saved for printing.

They even have a Yahoo group...Simply Lapbooks worth checking into.