IEW - Medieval History Based Writing Lessons

This year, because we are studying the Middle Ages for history, I decided to purchase the Medieval History Based lessons from IEW (Institute for Excellence in Writing) for sons C and A to use for writing.  I love when content areas such as history or science can be merged into writing practice.  I don't normally buy a new writing curriculum each year, as I am so familiar with IEW's methodology that I can make our own writing assignments based on any subject that we wish to write about. However, I wanted to be a bit more systematic this year, especially for Little Man, who has learned so much IEW from listening to me teach his older siblings that I forget he himself has had very little formal IEW instruction!

I LOVE this book!  So happy we went this direction.  It dovetails so nicely with our history studies, and builds writing practice step by step.  It has a track for older students that requires more work, so it is easy to use with both boys at their respective levels.

We did a lot of good writing this past week.  Here Little Man is making his key word outline based on a paragraph on the Byzantine Empire:

And here is son C doing the same thing.  He had two paragraphs to outline, rather than one.  The following day they wrote their own paragraphs based on the outlines they had made.  We talked about quality adjectives, and found places in their paragraphs to "dress up" with these great adjectives.  The day after that they typed up and printed their own paragraphs.

Little Man is gluing his paragraphs into a bound book of blank pages, and adding pictures on the facing pages, so that by the end of the year he will have his very own hand-made history book!