We’re finally up and running!
We’ve had so many great experiences this year that I’ve wanted to capture and share with others. My intention has been to start a blog for some time now, and we’re finally starting to make this a reality! But what to do about all those fun and exciting things we’ve done thus far? Well, my first few posts are simply to play “catch up” – to document the major projects we’ve completed this school year. And so now, finally, we will provide a glimpse into our learning discoveries, one step at a time, here in the Half-a-Hundred Acre Wood Hollow. My prayer is that it will be a blessing and inspiration to you!
You may also want to check out this fantastic Hands-On History Middle Ages Project Passport study we completed as well!
Medieval Unit Study
This year, we’ve been studying and completing a variety of activities about the Medieval Period. We learned about Medieval European geography, memorizing many of the countries, cities, and geographical features along with the corresponding history we were studying. We completed a lapbook using Homeschool Share’s free lapbooking units. We used the Knights and Castles Lapbook unit, as well as many of the items from the more advanced Castle Diary lapbook. (You can find additional Middle Ages unit studies here.)
For Language Arts, we read The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleischman and completed the corresponding Total Language Plus workbook with a focus on similes, metaphors, adjectives and adverbs (not to mention challenging vocabulary!).
The boys LOVED constructing a paper model of NEUSCHWANSTEIN CASTLE from Papertoys.com. It had very thorough instructions, so even as our first papertoy model, it was fairly simple to construct. Notice our boys also wearing their “How to Train your Dragon” pajamas…
We also completed a Knight Pyramid Project (which Stephen used during one of his weekly presentations; this project is no longer available online)…
and played The Armor of God file folder game, which tied in nicely with our memorization of Ephesians 6.
We even built (and knocked down) cardboard box castles many, many times.
The boys dressed up as my knights in shining armor and pretended to be warriors for a day… and we played on a playground that looked like a castle.
Then we posted all of our memory work on our timeline (the following is just a snippet of the medieval portion of our timeline):
Stephen insisted that we also complete Homeschoolshare’s Plague Lapbook, since it was quite a bit of information just by itself. It was very fascinating to find out why the Plague doctors dressed up as birds. We decided to watch Tale of Despereaux with its theme of chivalry and honor, and then we declared a Soup Day, which turned out to be a pretty comical ordeal.
As we closed out the unit, the boys received a Lego Kingdoms Set as a reward for their hard work! They built the Outpost Attack, which includes a catapult. You can imagine the thrill of setting off a catapult over and over and over…
We returned to a medieval activity when Daddy brought home a wooden Trebuchet catapult kit from South Korea. So, even Daddy got in on the fun, and our toddler had fun setting it off, as well (though I don’t have a good picture of that part).
