The Reformation

The 7th grade "Age of Discovery" main lesson block encompasses the Age of Exploration, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. There is a lot of content, so I'll do a post for each! Here are the resources we used and liked this year:

Our main text was

A Child's History of the World by V.M. Hillyer
(published by Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951)



chap 63 - Christians Quarrel

chap 64 - King Elizabeth

chap 65 - The Age of Elizabeth

I also like

The Age of Discovery
by Charles Kovacs
(which can be used as a main text for this entire 3-part block)

chap 41 - The Wars of the Roses

chap 42 - Borgia and Savonarola

chap 43 - Martin Luther

chap 44 - Luther and the Reformation

chap 45 - The Diet of Worms

chap 46 - Calvin and Knox

chap 47 - Henry VIII

chap 48 - Mary Queen of Scots

chap 49 - The Great Armada

chap 50 - Elizabethan Times, Shakespeare, Raleigh

chap 51 - Francis Drake



The World of Columbus and Sons
by Genevieve Foster
(which can be used as a main text for this entire 3-part block)


Vintage King Henry VIII Playing Cards





How They Croaked: The Awful Ends Of The Awfully Famous
by Georgia Bragg
"Henry VIII: Who Not to Marry," pp.35-41
"Elizabeth I: She Kept Her Head About Her," pp.43-49


Amazon Prime:

Tudor Monastery Farm (6 episodes)

Lucy Worsley's 12 Days of Tudor Christmas (1 episode)


In 2015 my oldest daughter, Natalie, read a bunch of historical fiction for this block and wrote book reviews of each title. There is a lot written about the six wives of Henry VIII! Here are her favorites:


Mary, Bloody Mary
by Carolyn Meyer

waldorf_curric
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Many Ups and Downs of Queen Mary
Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2015

I am thirteen and I read this book for a unit on the Renaissance. This one is definitely my favorite so far. I have read four others. Mary, Bloody Mary is about Mary Tudor, daughter of the famous Henry VIII. Mary has to live through her mother's death and the rest of her father's many wives (there were six in all and her least favorite of his wives was Anne Boleyn). Mary loved her mother but the king divorced her and treated her unkindly. After her mother died the king ordered everyone to wear yellow and throw a party.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is studying the Renaissance or just for fun. It was very interesting and exciting. When the physician cut open her mother after she had died he remarked that her heart was black thru and thru. This he said means that Queen Catherine was poisoned slowly till she died. Mary wondered who ordered that she be poisoned and who carried it out. After Queen Catherine died Mary had to go and see Elizabeth her half-sister be born. Once Elizabeth was born she was crowned Princess of Wales and Mary was now Lady Mary. She was no longer a princess and she was lower than her own ladies in waiting. She was allowed only two servants and her job was to change Elizabeth's soiled napkins (diapers). Mary had planned an escape route when all of a sudden she was told to go to another castle. She was furious. Somehow the king either learned of her escape plan or guessed. Read this book to find out what happens next. Mary's life went through many ups and downs before she finally became Queen of England!



The Redheaded Princess: A Novel
by Ann Rinaldi

waldorf_curric
5.0 out of 5 stars
Before She Became Queen...
Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2015

I am thirteen years old and I read this book for a unit on the Reformation. It definitely helped me to understand the life of first Lady, then Princess, then Queen Elizabeth I. It also helped me to understand why she never married.

Young Elizabeth was always having to go from place to place. She came to live at Hatfield when she was 3, after her mother (Anne Boleyn) was beheaded and she lived there, occasionally going to court, and she lived through all her father's other wives. After Elizabeth's father Henry VIII died, Katherine Parr (his sixth and final wife) told Elizabeth that she was originally going to marry Sir Thomas Seymour but then the king asked her to marry him. In the end, Elizabeth was falsely accused of having affairs with Thomas Seymour so she was put in the Tower of London. She was found not guilty. And then when she was released from the Tower, Mary ordered her to stay in Woodstock (which is a falling apart castle) and then she returned to Hatfield.

Mary Tudor did everything possible so that Elizabeth wouldn't be the next person on the throne after her. But both of her children died, and then Mary died afterwards. She was old and getting weak and then the babies weakened her even more. First Mary got pregnant and then she lost the baby. Then she got pregnant again and she went past her due date and didn't deliver. It was going to be a 12 month baby. Mary wasn't sure if it was a baby. It may have been some type of disease. Elizabeth waited at Hatfield for Mary to die. It was there that she was living when she became queen. The suspense in the book is because you don't know if she's going to live to ever become queen. I would recommend it to a friend.

Next year, in eighth grade, we will do the whole of U.S. History. This is a lot for one year (and some Waldorf schools take grade 8 and garde 9 to do it) but the goal is to get them up to Current Events on the last day of school.

Because the U.S. is a young country, and because we walk children through history in chronological order, we don't arrive at a deep study of America until the end of middle school (in elementary school we do study heroes throughout history, Native American cultures, local geography & industry, the 50 states... but we do not cover the darker chapters in our country's story)!

I actually prefer to do it this way because then children are emotionally ready for the many strong themes that come up in U.S. History. It is designed that way deliberately, that the content comes to them when they have the maturity for it. This way we do not have to sugarcoat or simplify history (like Thanksgiving) because the children are not prepared for it.

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