braymalena Posted February 6, 2012 Share Posted February 6, 2012 Hi all, I have not been able to find many detailed reviews on these guides, and I had a few questions about either the Greenleaf Guide to Ancient Lit or Medieval Lit... It looks like it is about 24 weeks of lessons per guide and then it the recommends adding more writing in between units. With that in mind, I would appreciate any info anyone could give me on how you scheduled it, how long it took to complete each day, and whether you liked it or not. Thanks so much, :) Katie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ellie Posted February 6, 2012 Share Posted February 6, 2012 Hi all,I have not been able to find many detailed reviews on these guides, and I had a few questions about either the Greenleaf Guide to Ancient Lit or Medieval Lit... It looks like it is about 24 weeks of lessons per guide and then it the recommends adding more writing in between units. With that in mind, I would appreciate any info anyone could give me on how you scheduled it, how long it took to complete each day, and whether you liked it or not. Thanks so much, :) Katie Well, they aren't "literature guides" (except for the two that are not yet published). The Shearers originally started with the Famous Men of...books, written by someone whose name I cannot remember, lol, and wrote guides to go with them--Greenleaf Press's Guides to Famous Men of...There were no "famous men" of Egypt, so they just wrote a guide. Ditto with Old Testament. They included other resources as part of their study guides for each of the Famouse Men of...books. I used them man years ago in a one-room, multi-grade school. We did all of them in a year--Ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece, and Middle Ages. I probably could have gotten more out of them if I'd used them at home, but they still made a good survey. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
braymalena Posted February 6, 2012 Author Share Posted February 6, 2012 Greenleaf Guide to Ancient Literature: http://www.greenleafpress.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=56&products_id=982 Greenleaf Guide to Medieval Literature: http://www.greenleafpress.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=56&products_id=1485 I have no idea if those links will work, but if you go to Greenleaf's site you will find the lit guides under the "study packages" section once you click on "store". There are also some samples on Rainbow Resource. Sorry if I wasn't very clear on my first post! :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sebastian (a lady) Posted February 6, 2012 Share Posted February 6, 2012 Well, they aren't "literature guides" (except for the two that are not yet published). The Shearers originally started with the Famous Men of...books, written by someone whose name I cannot remember, lol, and wrote guides to go with them--Greenleaf Press's Guides to Famous Men of...There were no "famous men" of Egypt, so they just wrote a guide. Ditto with Old Testament. They included other resources as part of their study guides for each of the Famouse Men of...books. I used them man years ago in a one-room, multi-grade school. We did all of them in a year--Ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece, and Middle Ages. I probably could have gotten more out of them if I'd used them at home, but they still made a good survey. The Famous Men books were written by Pollard and Haaren, around the turn of the last century. There are volumes for Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages and Modern Times (meaning folks like Bismark and Galileo). Both Greenleaf and Memoria Press have reprinted the Famous Men books. The Memoria editions have color illustrations and maps. However, theoriginal Famous Men books (not the study guides) are also available free online in digital versions. The Baldwin Project has all of them. The Greenleaf and Memoria versions may have done some editing and/or adding of additional figures, depending on the title. We liked the Famous Men books, but I though the study guides were sort of hit and miss. They tend to have comprehension quesitons and vocab. There is a Memoria Press guide sample here. ETA: Ah, I see there are actual lit guides too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Julie in MN Posted February 6, 2012 Share Posted February 6, 2012 Katie, I have the Ancient Lit one and used it for some ideas for working with Oedipus, I think it was. I could get it out to refresh my memory more, but I know I didn't schedule it or anything, so probably not going to be able to help. I just chimed in because you haven't found anyone else who's used it yet :) Julie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daveswife Posted February 6, 2012 Share Posted February 6, 2012 Bump. I'd love to know how others incorporated composition to make the Ancient Literature a full English credit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sbaloue Posted February 6, 2012 Share Posted February 6, 2012 I have both the Ancient and the Medieval Guides. I was planning to do the Ancients this year but have misplaced the guide in this home:tongue_smilie:. Biblioplan schedules the Ancient guide for high schoolers in their history guide. www.biblioplan.net. Anyway, I did look through the guide before I misplaced it and it looks very good. The suggested books are studied in detail with worksheets and thought-provoking questions. What I don't like about the guides is there are no answers to the questions. I think the idea is that the parent reads the books along with the students and then discusses the books. This is fine if the parent has time to read all the books. Looking in the Medieval guide I see the following for each lesson: vocabulary words (you have to look them us yourself) worksheets questions about the author and background historical background questions about the book The Medieval guide has twenty-one lessons with each lesson taking about one week. Each book is covered for about two to four weeks each. The guides are designed to be written in or the work can be done in a seperate notebook. The Medieval guide covers: Anglo-Saxon lit, Middle English lit, Renaissance lit and a World View study. I hope this helps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
braymalena Posted February 7, 2012 Author Share Posted February 7, 2012 Thank you for the info! If anyone has anything else to add, please do! :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beezus Posted February 7, 2012 Share Posted February 7, 2012 I have the Greenleaf Guide to Ancient Literature. We haven't used it straight through, because my dd doesn't really like the workbooky approach, especially all the vocabulary lists. Quite a few of the short-answer questions are recall-type questions, but there are some that have you ponder on a character's motivations and why they respond the way they do. I like that the final lesson assignments list more than one option. There are some overview chart to help keep characters straight and help analyze what's going on in each scene/chapter. The beginning of the book mentions one lesson a week. Some of the lessons seemed rather short for a week's worth of high school work. For example, the section on Oedipus Rex was 5 lessons, but I didn't really want to spend 5 weeks on it. I just pulled out the material from the guide that I thought would be good and used that. If you wanted to take a more leisurely approach it would probably be just the thing. In her introduction the author cautions against avoiding the "cattle drive" approach. We just felt like it dragged out a bit too much for us. My kid gets cranky about having to answer a lot of recall questions or "what happened in lines 156-207?" kinds of questions. Also, this guide limits itself to Mesopotamia and Greece, and there's a lot more ancient literature from other places that one might want to explore. After two and half weeks we were perfectly satisfied to leave Oedipus Rex behind and move on to something else. Don't know if this helps much since we didn't use it as directed. I think it is a useful resource and I will probably dip back into again when we decide to read another of the works covered in this guide. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
braymalena Posted February 8, 2012 Author Share Posted February 8, 2012 Thanks so much for the info. It is good to know that things could move along a bit faster because I wanted to add some other ancient lit to the mix. That way I am not overwhelming my ds too much! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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