Hi, Bean,
Just thinking about your situation, and given that your DD is 10, one question you might think about is whether her writing skills correspond to her reading level. I know that my dc, for a long time, was a voracious and comprehending reader at an upper-high-school level, but his writing and analytical skills, though quite high for his chron age, were not at the same level. By age 13-14, that changed completely, and at 14, he reads and writes at a college level. But there was a huge developmental leap there. So at age 10 or 11, if you are seeing something similar, I wonder whether you might build language skills and historical background by doing (as you suggest) something on the MIddle Ages and a bit beyond. You could do Beowulf (I love, love the Seamus Heaney version) and some Chaucer (bits of Canterbury Tales?), and perhaps have creative/fiction assignments as well as analytical stuff. (Just understanding Beowulf and Chaucer at that age would be fantastic and a wonderful challenge, let alone thinking about poetic structure and that sort of thing). She could read some "Inferno," maybe? (My dc, for whatever reason, LOVED the Inferno at 11 and got into the circles.) And to lighten things up :-), it might be really fun to read some 19th- and 20th-century takes on the period. Anything from Walter Scott to the Hobbit.
Anyway, all I'm trying to say is that there seems to be some asynchronous development in humanities kids -- i.e., a gap between reading and writing. Think of Jane Austen's Juvenilia -- you can see glimmers of what she will be, but she's still very young in her understanding of people, events, and structure. So in hindsight, I guess I got some of it right -- I let him read everything and encouraged him to read and talk about it. But at that age (10-11), writing assignments were mostly fiction or light analysis. It wasn't until 12 that a true high school approach made sense, with more rigorous attention to literary terms, structure, and higher-level analysis.
Now, at 14, the difficulty is that he is quickly outpacing high school anything. :-) I have to figure out how to get him into State Uni courses before their age 16 breakpoint.
I hope this is useful. Ignore it if not! :-)
