History Club Begins Again!

I'm excited to start a new school year and a new slice of history!  This year we will be focusing on Eastern Civilizations from pre-history to Medieval times. I will be utilizing this Glencoe textbook:

We will loosely follow this textbook.  If you would like to use it for reading outside of class, just let me know and you can borrow it in between lessons.  It is a middle school textbook, and so it geared toward that level of reading, but many of the shorter articles are just cool to read for our younger students as well!
We will have a number of different grades, learning styles, and interest levels present at our History Club Meetings this year. (as usual)  With that said, I encourage each student to keep a three-ring binder to put handouts and project instructions in.  We will be maintaining a timeline that would be useful to have in the binder as well.  For some lessons we will be creating lap-book type inserts that can also be kept in the binder.
I will be using this blog site to keep us all on the same page as to the subject area covered at each class and any extra assignments that may be worked on outside of meetings.  I will also try to keep a running list of videos and books that relate to our lessons for added interest.
 Parents and students feel free to post comments or share things you learn along the way!  It's a lot more interesting to take ownership over our learning than to passively absorb info every other week.

*A note on Health lessons:  We had discussed having the students take turns sharing a health topic with the class at the beginning of each History lesson.  This would entail the student to read, watch, or in some way learn about a health-related topic, present a short synopsis of what they learned (5 min) and hand out some type of info sheet to each of the other students to keep.  Each student would only have to do the work once every few months, but they will all be getting a short health lesson twice a month.  I will do an example lesson at our first History Club so that everyone will have something to go on.