Smockity Frocks is offering a free e-book with over 50 pages of tips from a homeschool veteran of more than 11 years. Topics include:
Read about it here:
http://www.smockityfrocks.com/2011/05/free-homeschool-tips-ebook.html
While there is not an extensive list of living history books suggested within History Revealed, I have found a couple of resources which have been very useful.
The first one is Rainbow Resource Centre , which was recommended by Bill Waring after I asked the Waring’s for a reading list:
http://www.rainbowresource.com/prodlist.php?sid=1296654003-1125049&subject=14&category=3949.
The other is Mary Collis’ Home School Favourites:
http://www.homeschoolfavourites.com.au/diana-waring.html.
Both of these companies sell individual book titles and packages that are relevant to all three time periods. The Home School Favourites website has a very comprehensive review of each book she recommends, along with reading ages and a mention of any questionable content. We base our purchases and reading lists on a combination of all three resources.
Further to my earlier post about the BBC’s Shakespeare Collection (which arrived yesterday!), I just found a handy-dandy list of the plays, in chronological order. It may not be 100% correct, but it’s close enough for me; I’m a bit of a sucker for a timeline :)
1300-1200 BC A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Two Noble Kinsmen
1300-1200 BC Troilus and Cressida
450 BC Pericles, Prince of Tyre
431-404 BC Timon of Athens
400 BC Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale
254-184 BC A Comedy of Errors
44 BC Julius Caesar
30 BC Antony and Cleopatra
40 AD Cymbeline
300-400 AD Titus Andronicus
400 AD King Lear
700 AD Hamlet
1005-1057 AD Macbeth
1199-1216 AD King John
1200s AD Love's Labors Lost, The Taming of the Shrew,
Two Gentlemen of Verona
1260-1387 AD Romeo and Juliet
1300s Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like it, Twelfth Night, All's Well that Ends Well
1327-1377 AD Edward III
1377-1399 AD Richard II
1399-1413 AD Henry IV
1413-1422 AD Henry V
1422-1471 AD Henry VI
1483-1485 AD Richard III
1509-1547 AD Henry VIII
late 1500 AD Othello, Measure for Measure
1609 AD The Tempest
I have been eying off the BBC’s Shakespeare Collection for quite a while now, because it contains all 37 features from the television series which aired from 1978 to 1985. Yesterday I saw it going cheap on Ebay so I snapped it up; now all we have to do now is wait…
We both enjoy watching a bit of Shakespeare, and the plan is also to use the historical plays to complement the history curriculum that we are using. At the moment the kids are studying ancient Rome, so the first plays we watch will probably be Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. I Claudius is a bit too graphic to watch with the kids, but these plays should be ok.
“Let him be taught not so much the facts of history as how to judge them.”
Michel de Montaigne
The kids are now studying Ancient Greece and we will soon be reading that copy of Black Ships Before Troy which has been sitting on a shelf for a couple of years. It’s very exciting.
Now, I didn’t study history in school, but I wish I had. Learning about lives and great empires which have come and gone has a way of putting your life in perspective. In Australia, where warfare, death and the “natural” order of things is largely out of sight, it is easy to forget that we are like the grass, destined to live for a short time before withering, dying and fading out of remembrance.
History reminds us of our mortality.
As a result, history focuses us on the important things in life: those things which are bound up in God’s plan to reconcile man to Himself. When we study history we are following the course of that plan from the beginning to the present, watching His providential hand at work. It helps our kids understand that they and their family form a part of God’s plan: that they have a part to play, too.
Steve
