? About the new guide coming out this year……

Which new guide??  Also Sonya.. by chance are you working on another handbook for history? One after Matthew??  These are a great blessing to me as I am the farthest thing away from a history teacher.  But with these books I have made it happen and I thank you so much for them.  I am praying that God continues to bless you with the time and talent to continue to give us these awesome handbooks.  Thanks Misty

You’re right, Missy. The goal is to have the Middle Ages/Renaissance/Reformation handbook ready this coming spring. It will contain most of the books listed on that module in the Curriculum Guide. I may omit some of those titles as optional, but that list will provide the basic framework. For example, I’ve decided to go with the Famous Men spine books in the daily plans, so you wouldn’t need the Story of spine books unless you wanted to substitute them.

I also plan to incorporate Greenleaf Press’s new book, Voices of the Renaissance and Reformation, for high schoolers. And we’ll have two new Bible studies coming out, Lord willing, to go with that handbook: one for the family to do together and one for 7-12 graders to do individually.

Once I get the handbook finished, I’ll rework the online module chart to reflect any changes.

They’re both good. The main reasons I went with Famous Men are

1. It is shorter. Since we’re covering both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and Reformation during one year, I opted for the shorter books. For example, Famous Men of the Middle Ages has only 34 chapters, whereas The Story of the Middle Ages has 147 chapters. We would be pretty rushed to read both that Story of book and the Story of the Renaissance book in one year.

2. Rob Shearer is working on bringing the Famous Men series up to present day. I haven’t found any other history spine that covers Modern Times, so the promise of consistency was a real plus in sticking to this series. I like the worldwide historical emphasis of his books so far. The next two Story of books focus on American History. I’m hoping that the next Famous Men books will continue the world history overview. We can easily add in lots of American History books for the younger grades, but the older grades need the world history for those time periods too. So I thought the Famous Men series was a better choice in this situation.

You could probably get a good idea of the difference between what is covered in the two if you compare the Table of Contents of the two books. You can see what is included in both by reading their chapter titles, which are listed in our CM Bookfinder.

Here is Famous Men of the Middle Ages.

Here is Story of the Middle Ages.

Hope this helps!