Chloe's studies in history (this year)

Chloe is in 7th grade and is my voracious reader.





This year we started off with the text recommended for 7th grade by Seton, "Catholic World Culture," which is written by Dr Anne W Carroll (the author of a great history text called "Christ the King, Lord of History"). Each chapter covers a contribution to world culture in context of what was happening in the Church at the time. I think the chapters are well written and enjoyable, and love the rich contextual church history intertwined with the secular.

Here's what she's covered so far: the chapter on...
1. the construction of St Peter's and the Vatican
2. Michelangelo
3. Leonardo daVinci
4. St Catherine of Sienna





However, after a while I realized that it would be easy to round out her studies by having her read through a booklist focusing on ancient history (a time period we haven't done much study in). I don't have the booklist on hand as I type, but here are most of the books on the list:

-The Children's Homer by Padraic Colum
-Archimedes and the Door of Science
- Beowulf, retold in verse by Ian Serraillier
(last year she read H.E. Marhall's story version)
-The Story of the Greeks by H A Guerber
-The Story of the Romans by H A Guerber
-Outcast by Rosemary Sutcliff
-Augustus Caesar's World by Genevieve Foster
-Adventures of the Greek Heroes by Mollie McLean
-String, Straight-edge, & Shadow by Julia E. Diggins
-The Robe by ?
-Ben Hur by ?
-*Lion of God by Taylor Caldwell (one of my all-time favorite authors!)
-*The Agony & the Ecstasy by Irving Stone

*I love these books, but haven't read them in a while. I need to check for age appropriateness. They will likely be more suited to high school than middle school.

We'll see how it goes. I think Genevieve Foster's books get a little boring after a while, so I might remove that book from the list if I think it is redundant information.

Although Chloe is definitely a "scholar" type and doesn't need much outside help, I sometimes make comprehension sheets for her to fill out while reading the book in order to help things "stick". Also, I occasionally have her do extra reading for background information. For example, along with the Children's Homer, Chloe had a little mini-unit on Homer which very briefly covered Homer, the Dark Greek Ages, and the Hellenistic age.



The main book I have her use for background information is "Streams of Civilization vol.1".




Also, the poem we are studying in our year-long Victorian poetry unit (Marmion by Sir Walter Scott) is set around the Battle of Flodden Field, so we'll get a little Scottish history thrown in there too :-)

Right now we are having very simple geography lessons: learning the locations of the U.S. states (again) and their capitals (again). Next week will be the Northeast states and then we should be done. Yay! Then we'll be moving on to the countries and their capitals in this order (may take more than just this school year) Europe/Mediterranean...Middle East...Asia...South America....Africa... other)