The Ron Paul Curriculum for homeschooling has had me take the 7th grade History course, which has covered everything from the fall of Rome in 476 AD to 1750 AD, just before the American Revolutionary War. If you would like to learn some of the things that I have learned about during this course, I have written summary posts about many of them on this same blog, and the course I took is still available. This post is a review of the lessons themselves.
The highlights of the course went mostly as: the growth of the Pope’s power, the growth of Islam, the Crusades, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Explorers of the New World, and the colonization of the New World, as well as England’s extreme growth over all this time from an island country to the world power during the colonization era. This was by no means at all the whole of what we learned about, but it is what we spent the majority of our time going into detail about.
The videos that contained the lesson material, or the important part of the lessons, were averagely nine minutes long, with the shortest being five and the longest being around 15 minutes or so. They got the lessons across well and I very rarely felt that I didn’t get enough information about the subject from them, but they tended to skim over some things that felt rather important, like the Ottoman Empire, while going very in depth on some tangents, mostly religious, like the Reformation.
The vast majority of the lessons, excluding only a few, were accompanied by reading assignments of varying length. These were somewhat annoying, as they often repeated what the lessons had already stated, but with a lot more words, as the reading assignments were often quite long. They would, occasionally, be optional extras to the lessons, like a more detailed biography of a famous person, or an excerpt of a book written by them, though they were often mandatory.
The final part of the lessons were the homework assignments, which would be pdf files that I could download and then either print out or work on them on my computer, which I often did, then fill out the questions on them. There would often be 7-10 questions relating to what I had learned, but were fairly easy as long as I paid attention to the videos. The next day’s lesson would correct the worksheets.
I enjoyed this 7th grade History course on the Ron Paul Curriculum, as well as the previous grades that I have taken, and heartily recommend them to anyone interested in a history course.
School Essays 