We are beginning to study the middle ages in our homeschool, and I’ve decided to make it into a bunch of different mini-units. Our first one will focus on knights and castles.
Read further for all the books we read as well as the activities we did, but come back soon and check out our other middle ages units as well. I will be posting them on the blog as we complete them!
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Read Aloud Novel
“The Door in the Wall” by Marguerite de Angeli takes place in the middle ages. It follows the story of a young boy who is destined to become a page but is suddenly ill and unable to fulfill his duty. A monk comes to his aid and encourages him to learn new things and work on becoming stronger. His hard work will soon pay off as he will play an important role in protecting the castle.
This book came highly recommended (from many other homeschool mamas online) as a historical fiction novel to read while studying the middle ages. The language can be tricky to understand, and by reading it aloud, I was able to explain what many different things meant. (I also learned some things myself!)
The book is 121 pages and contains 10 chapters, most of which we were able to read in one sitting. The last two chapters were much longer and took us a couple of days to get through.
I also love the message and theme that surrounded the story. Hard work and perseverance can really pay off. When one opportunity ends, another one might come along. You may think about a modern day phrase, “When one door closes, another opens”. All of these ideas brought on great discussion with my kids.
We all enjoyed this book so much. Although we used it to study history, we also used it for my oldest daughter’s language arts lessons. (Read about that here)
More Books
I love using the library as our main source for books, and for this unit, I even visited a local used bookstore. That may get dangerous in the future. I could’ve bought so much! I found tons of good reads and I’ll share the best ones here. You can also check out my YouTube video where I share a peak inside of the books as well.
- DK Level 3: Knights and Castles (early reader chapter book)
- If You Were a Kid in a Medieval Castle (easy, quick read aloud with facts)
- Brave Young Knight (picture book with Christian message)
- “Castle” by David Macaulay (beautiful, living book; long, but worth the read)
- Ms. Frizzle’s Adventures: Medieval Castle (silly picture book with facts included)
- Castle Diary: The Journal of Tobias Burgess, Page (chapter book, diary)
- The Best Book of: Knights and Castles (reference book with illustrations)
- Imagine You’re a Knight (picture book, imaginary, not historically accurate)
- Sir Cumference and All the King’s Tens (a series, adorable picture books, math related)
Coat of Arms
Almost every book we read about knights talked about a coat of arms. Knights would decorate their shields in a way to represent who they were. This was a fun activity to express who we are and decorate our own pretend shields.
You could definitely cut cardboard and paint if you wanted to go all out. We just used white paper! I cut the papers into a shape of a shield and I offered a couple of options. Decorate the whole shield or divide it into 2-4 pieces and add different designs to each piece. They each did something different, but I loved seeing what they chose to add to their shield.
I had them tell me about their designs and what it meant to them so I could write it on the back. It’s a great piece of art for their portfolios.
Create Castle and Drawbridge
This activity and the two following activities were completed after reading portions of “Castle” by David Macaulay. This book seemed a little intimidating to me because it’s quite long, but it was highly recommended. It turned out to be absolutely wonderful and we learned so much! It did take about 3 days to get through it all.
We created a castle using a cardboard box from our pantry. This blog post breaks down the entire process. Since I have younger ones, I did a little bit of prep to help the activity run smoother. By the time we were ready to start, I already had the boxes shaped.
I had my two oldest each decorate their own castle. I will admit that once it was time to create the drawbridge, I could only help one at a time. If you had older kids, it may be fun to hand them the supplies and say – how can you make this work?
With my two (ages 6 and 8), we talked about it as we went, and I had to do a lot of the work so that the drawbridge would do what it was supposed to. Even still, they loved the finished product and immediately got their Barbies out to start acting out a castle attack. It was pretty cute to watch, and such a fun way to assess what they’ve been learning – through play! I love it!
Castle Drawing and Narration
Before we read our Castle story one morning, I found a video that taught my girls how to draw a castle. Now, we love Art for Kids Hub, but their castle drawing could only be watched if you pay for a subscription on their website.
So, we did something crazy and decided to just draw the Ice Castle from their YouTube channel. I encouraged my girls to decorate it like the castles we have been reading about. My oldest did just that and kept the snow. My other two girls just went full blown Frozen and kept the ice castle.
Either way, it was still fun and I decided to use their pictures as a visual for their narration of what we read that morning. I wrote something for my two oldest girls and kept it in our yearly portfolio. I love how it turned out.
Build-A-Castle Rotation
Just one more day of reading this book (“Castle”), and I wanted something fun to finish it off. We have a few open-ended toys at our house, so I chose four different bins full of blocks to get us started.
I set out four blankets for our morning time and put a bin on each blanket. We had Magnatiles, Mega Blocks , Duplo Legos, and wooden blocks. I told each of my kids that I would set a timer for five minutes and they’d have to build a castle out of that specific toy.
At the end of the timer, no matter if they finished or not, they would rotate to the next blanket and build another castle. They thought this was the coolest. It really broke up the time well! They made all kinds of castles and it was the perfect way to finish off the book while keeping hands busy and ears listening. It was also neat to see their creativity and became a beautiful way to assess their understanding!
Still on My Wishlist
I always like to have a few ideas in my head of what I want to do for our unit studies. I’ll usually make a board on Pinterest (See my middle ages board). The thing is, I don’t always get to every single one. That’s because they are mostly enrichment! And if it adds more stress to complete it, then I put it off for another time.
I love homeschooling with this philosophy because I don’t feel pressured to check a bunch of things off. We still learn so much through our readings! The next couple of activities are ones I wanted to do but didn’t quite get to during our unit. However, they’re too cute not to share! I’ll be saving them for a rainy day, but I hope they might inspire you if you’re studying the middle ages!
Sir Cumference
The Sir Cumference series is so much fun. They are picture books based in the medieval times that teach math concepts through stories.
We found ours at the library. I checked out four of them and we simply read them together before bedtime for a few nights in a row. My kids loved them!
Although we didn’t do an activity to go along with it. I kept thinking how fun it would be to do a simple graphing idea with some candy or cookies, just like in the “Roundabout Battle” story. Check out this candy bar graph for an idea of what I mean. You can also see this photo of an M&M pie chart for another type of graph the book used.
These are such simple ways to bring the book to life and experience the graph in our own hands instead of just the story.
Armor of God
One of the books that we read had a Christian message, and it was called “The Brave Young Knight”. The book was great alone, but I had this idea to do a little armor of God study to go along with it.
You can find the armor of God in the bible in Ephesians 6:10-20. Once we read about it in scripture, I wanted to create a fun, easy knight using aluminum foil shapes. This link will give you a better idea of what I’m talking about.
As we review the armor of God, I hoped to cut the different pieces of the armor out of the foil, glue it on construction paper and label it. I just feel like this could be such a fun way to link our study of knights to what we learn in scripture. It’s also a great visual to help us memorize the verses.
Movies/Shows
We have a family movie night on the weekends, and I love when I can match it up to what we are learning. During this unit, we watched a couple of movies that were related to knights and castles.
First, was The Sword in the Stone. This is an old Disney film that follows the adventures of a young boy who wants to be a knight. It is very magical, but it does take place in the time period. Since I have kids ages 2-8, it was a great one that we could all enjoy.
Another weekend, we let the bigger kids watch A Knight’s Tale. Now, this one is rated PG-13 and it took a little editing on our part.
First, we had to talk with the kids about the language. We also had to be prepared to skip a love scene in the film. The only other thing was one of the first scenes. You see a man’s butt and there’s also a visual of someone hanging in the background. Beyond those few parts, the rest of the film was fantastic!
I highly suggest you read through the Common Sense Media page, and as always, choose what you think is best for your family. Everyone has a preference for movies, and as parents we get the privilege to choose what is shown in our home. In my opinion, it was worth the watch, even though we skipped a small bit. The film portrays that time period so well. You can really see the different classes of people as well as things like jousting and coats of arms, all of which we discussed together the weeks before.
More Unit Studies
Come back soon for more unit studies related to the middle ages. If you liked looking through these ideas or if you try one at home, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
We’ve been doing unit studies like this all year and I have most of them on the blog. I’ll link some of them below if you’d like check them out!
