I’ve been designing our homeschool’s curriculum for several years.  I base our unit studies on a historical period timeline.   One year we study everything “ancient”.  The next year we move on to studying everthing “middle ages”.  Then the following year our unit studies are based on “American history”.  The fourth year we focus on “modern world history”.  After these four years, we start over, but with more advanced assignments.

Every June I start planning the upcoming school year’s unit studies.  And I start this process by making a list of everything found on on a timeline that could/should be included in our lessons for the year.

As this homeschooling year comes to a close,  I am pleased that our Middle Ages/Renaissance unit studies have covered almost everything on my original list.  We will be ending our regular studies with church reformers .  Our summer school studies will include the great composers as we have elected music as one of our summer classes.

However, there is one topic on my list we haven’t studied yet.  Truthfully, I have been avoiding this particular study like the plague!  Actually, that is the study, the Bubonic Plague, Black Death.  This was such a terrible time in history as nearly one third of the European population died from this epidemic.  With less than three weeks left of our school year, and not wanting to end with this study, we will be covering the plague this week.

We will be reading about the Bubonic Plague from these library books.

Here’s the resource links we’ll be using

Teacher notes for the younger boys   http://www.mrdowling.com/703-plague.html

Black Death lecture for the older kids   http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture29b.html#map

The younger boys will work together to make lapbooks from  http://www.homeschoolshare.com/plague.php

I’m not surprised that I couldn’t find notebooking pages for this subject.   I’ll be designing our own notebooking pages using that  horrible art photo at the top of this post for my older kids.

Knowing that we are so close to finishing our homeschooling year will hopefully brighten our moods as we learn about Black Death.

betty jo