SOTW 2: Middle Ages Highlights
We are nearly done with our school year! This will be the first of four reviews for our 2023-2024 homeschool year so stay tuned if you’re looking for more on our science studies and preschool/1st grade, and 5th grade highlights.
First, can I just say, I LOVED learning about the Middle Ages. Of all the time periods in history, I felt like this was a time period I was least familiar with. I still have a lot to learn, but after homeschooling I feel like I have a better grasp on history than ever before and I think that is largely in part to the Story of the World books and the many many stories we’ve read about the people and places of our past. If you feel intimidated about teaching history because you don’t feel like you know it very well, just know, you’re not alone! I loved learning history in school and college and always did really well. BUT, it was a long time ago so admittedly I really don’t remember a lot and don’t feel very confident teaching it - especially world history. However, over the last few years, I’ve come to really enjoy history again and am really grateful for good curriculums to help guide us.
Second, if you’re new here, we started with the Story of the World curriculum in fall of 2022 so if you’re looking to start from the beginning in Ancient Times then you may want to read over these two posts first:
Also, it might be helpful if you read over my plans for this study here: 2023-2024 Curriculum Picks: Family Style History + Geography. We stayed pretty close to my plan, but I did veer a little with out unit studies and notebooking. I also did a more detailed blog post on our Vikings study last fall: The Vikings & Scandinavia. And, I do have an IG story highlight titled SOTW 2 where you can see a few things I showed through out the year in regards to this study.
One last question I get asked a lot is if you can read volume 2 without reading volume 1 first and, yes, you can totally do that.
Supplemental Resources
In addition to the 2nd volume of Story of the World we also used:
Medieval World: This is the recommended spine in the activity guide to use alongside SOTW. We loved it and it worked really well with all my kid’s ages.
Activity Guide: A lot of people ask me if they should get the activity guide and I think it’s worth it if you’re planning to do this family style, want extra reading material, and some ideas for projects. We mostly used this for narrations and book recommendations.
History Notebooks: We use the notebooking method alongside history and have been using these notebooks for the last few years.
Timeline Book: If you’ve been around long enough you’ll know we love our timeline book and have been working in it for three years now! It is so fun to flip back and see Ancient Times and Middle Ages pretty full now!
Living Book Timeline Cards: If you’re keeping a timeline book while you go through SOTW these printables are very helpful. They’re organized by chapter so they’re very easy to plug into the timeline which is what I needed. For volume 3 we will be printing these on sticker paper.
Lily & Thistle Art Makes Me Smart: Around the World: We love everything from Lily & Thistle and this is my very favorite course they offer. To supplement volume 2 we used projects and videos from Scandinavia (Vikings) and the United Kingdom (Manuscripts & Chivalry). To learn more about this art resource l I have a whole blog post you can read on it here: Lily & Thistle Art School.
Deep Space Sparkle: Sparklers Club - Art Through the Ages: I learned about this art resource half-way through our school year and wish I had known about it way back when we started our ancient times study. I enrolled in the subscription in January and have loved it. We plan to keep it through the next school year. One thing you should know about this resource though is that enrollment for this curriculum ONLY opens twice a year in August and January. It is JAM PACKED with resources. I included a picture out of my subscription so you can see the scope & sequence of the projects - it coordinates really well with SOTW volumes 1 & 2. You can learn more about the subscription here: The Sparklers Club.
Videos/YouTube: We supplement with a lot of random YouTube videos and I don’t keep track of everything we watch, but I’ll put a plug in for our two favorites…We really enjoyed Modern HistoryTV’s videos and BYU’s inter-faith film on Joan of Arc is an absolute must-see.
Book List: We supplemented with lots of books from the library and borrowed quite a few from one of my neighbors. I have some of our favorites compiled here: Middle Ages Book List.
My girl’s favorites were, hands down, the Viking Quest Series. They read all 5 of these books - they’re faith based and they’ve commented multiple times about how good the stories were.
My son’s favorite was Robin Hood. We read an abridged version as a family read-aloud. And, of course, we all loved lots of King Arthur stories.
By the way, just a heads up, in some of my earlier posts I have pictures of an Usborne version of Canterbury Tales. Canterbury Tales is a popular book that came recommended with studies of the Middle Ages so I added it to our original line up. I really know very little about that book other than it was deemed as a classic, but I had heard it could have some mature content. I thought the Usborne version may be cleaner, but ultimately decided it wasn’t for us and didn’t encourage my kids to read it. So, just a heads up if you saw it in some of my posts from last summer.
I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about Shakespeare this year and so did my girls! I introduced him at the beginning of the school year (he doesn’t come until the end of SOTW 2) which worked really well because it gave us all year to study his works. I’d definitely recommend The Bard of Avon to learn about his life. We used Usbourne adapted readers for the first few plays and then switched to the Charles and Mary Lamb: Tales of Shakespeare. It is fantastic for older children - my boys didn’t listen to these, but my girls and I loved it. The adaptations are clean and yet still hold onto some of that classic language. We also have William Shakespeare: Poetry for Kids which I really like and Where’s Will is a really fun one I’d also recommend.
Family Style + Study Schedule
We usually do history and science family style. I love family style, but I will say as our year progressed I can see where there is starting to be a little bit of a gap between my older two girls (who will be 11 in August) and my younger boys (7 & almost 5). I’ll share more about this and how I’ll be adapting per their individual needs below, but just know things are evolving because the dynamics of our family are, yet again, changing.
In the past, what has worked really well for us is to spend about 4-6 weeks studying history and then switch and study science for 4-6 weeks. Sometimes it’s a little shorter and sometimes it’s a little longer. But, I mostly choose to do it this way for two reasons. One - I don’t have to wrap my head around two different family style units at a time. When we’re in history, history is all I have to think about learning, prepping, and doing. And, two - I’ve found doing it this way is much easier to integrate into our lifestyle. If we miss a day or two or three or four…I’m never worried about going back to a science or history lesson we may have missed - we just pick up on where we were before. Sometimes, I need to combine lessons or skip projects, but for the most part, as long as we’re pretty consistent we move through our studies at a good pace and everything smooths out.
This year, my older girls were able to read the main SOTW book on their own. For the first half of the year (August-December) when we were studying history, they’d read a chapter a day and narrate it back to me. After we came back to our study around February I just let them keep going with the book and I’d check in every few chapters to make sure they knew what was going on. They cruised through the rest of the book and finished it up within a few weeks. Meanwhile, they were also reading a lot of other books and doing family style projects.
For my younger boys I used Medieval World as a spine (my older girls also read this) and we just moved through the book at their pace and explored their interests. Sometimes we dove deep and did longer studies - our Viking Study and knight studies were the longest. Last summer I posted a list of possible unit studies we might do based on this book and we followed very closely to that, but it flowed a little more naturally as we let our interests and the stories take the lead. As I mentioned, I also supplemented with lots of YouTube videos, books, art projects, and notebooking.
Why Story of the World + Next Year’s Changes
A few years ago one of the reasons I ended up going with Story of the World was because at that time we were doing a year-long study of the Old Testament and then the following year I knew we’d be doing a study of the New Testament. So, having this broader perspective of world history as a backdrop was absolutely perfect. I actually learned a lot! While Story of the World isn’t overtly religious - it is biblical so I loved that it gave my girls a better idea of what was going on during some of the major turning points in history leading up to and after Christ’s birth, resurrection, and ascension.
This year we’re working our way through the Book of Mormon and next year we’ll be in studying the Doctrine & Covenants. Last time when we were studying these scriptures we studied American History which was also a wonderful backdrop to these studies. Story of the World Volume 3: Early Modern Times would actually be a really great one to read as we finish up the Book of Mormon and move into Doctrine & Covenants. But, like I mentioned, my boys are just in a very different place than my girls. It takes a lot more time for me to simplify and bring them into Story of the World through other picture books and projects then I feel like I have the capacity to do. So, I do know I am going to go ahead and encourage the girls to finish up volumes 3 & 4 over the summer months. I think this will put them at a really great introduction to world history. The only thing I’ll have them to supplement this study is continue to add to our timeline book. We’ve loved this series and I would still continue to recommend it for upper elementary and middle school grades.
Next Fall my plan is just to start fresh with my girls doing their own history study and my boys doing another. This is most likely how it’ll be for science too. The girls are really good at working independently together but, by the end of this year they’re definitely starting to move out of that elementary mindset so I think moving them into their own study together will work really well. Then, I can just do some lighter things with my boys which will be much more developmentally appropriate for where they’re at. I wouldn’t be surprised if the girls still join in for some of the fun stuff I do with my boys, but I think they’ll really enjoy taking their studies to the next level. I’ll be sharing more about our curriculum picks in the coming weeks! Let me know if you have any questions!