Middle Ages: King Arthur, Charlemagne
The last week or so we have learned a lot about King Arthur and Charlemagne. Last week, I shared our monasteries worksheets. This week we finished reading a fabulous book about King Arthur. I’ve read a lot of King Arthur stories/books over the years, but this one was absolutely perfect for our homeschool… with rich exciting tales that the kids and I all loved! I mentioned it last week, but it’s work a mention again! It is King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (affiliate link) by Emma Gelders-Sterne. We read it aloud together and it took about two weeks (reading a story or two each day).
In our history book, we’ve gotten up to Charlemagne. (So, King Arthur would have lived in the late 400s; Charlemagne lived in the late 700s & died in 814). We read the sections from our history text. We are using Early Times : The Story of the Middle Ages (affiliate link) as our spine. It doesn’t have stellar reviews on Amazon, but personally this text works well for us. The kids are engaged (they are 7, 9, 11) and it does a good job of providing rich history details, yet being entertaining too. One reviewer said this book quite biased, but I personally don’t agree. Just as you can’t study a history of the Middle East or North Africa without studying Islam in great depth, you really cannot study the Middle Ages without going into Christianity/history of monasteries, etc. in great depth. I think the author has done a really good job writing for the late elementary/middle school crowd. That’s just my two cents here! 🙂
We also read the children’s book, The Elephant from Baghdad (affiliate link). It did a good job explaining who Charlemagne was and why he was interested in the Middle East. I really like having fun, light stories thrown into our history studies. This book even helped me understand Charlemagne’s connection to the Middle East!
I made the kids a couple of notebook pages about Charlemagne. My older two use sheets like these to take rough notes. I provided some information for you all if you need a few details on each topic.
After we finished King Arthur, we moved on to Favorite Medieval Tales (affiliate link) by Mary Pope Osborne (author of the Magic Tree House series). We’ve read the first few tales and tomorrow we’ll read the Song of Roland from that book which was written in the late Middle Ages (ie 500 years after Charlemagne’s reign) about Charlemagne’s campaigns in Spain. These are only loosely based on the real (historic) events and actually tell more about the time it was written (12th century) than about the events themselves.
One last thing before I go. I shared this neat link over on Facebook, but want to mention it here too. There’s a youtube video that shows a history of Europe in 3 minutes (6,000+ Years of History!) I showed this to the kids and stopped it at several key points to help them “see” how Europe changed in the early Middle Ages.
That’s about it for today!
See you again soon here or at our Homeschool Den Facebook Page!
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links above are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase.
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You might be interested in some of our other history materials:
We’ve studied other famous historic figures and have free notebook pages on figures such as
We’ve studied China
- China Fact Sheet (Free Download)
- China Unit: Books, Books A Huge List of Children’s Books and Novels
- Ancient China Packet (Free Notebook Pages)
- Chinese Brush Painting Lesson
- Free Confucius Notebook Pages
- Buddhism Learning Pack
We have learning packets on Africa and West African History and Ancient Egypt. We have a Free India Unit Packet (20 pages).
Other History Notebook Pages and Learning Packs I’ve made:
- Hinduism
- Islam,
- Catholicism (the New Catholic Pope),
- Ancient Egyptian Gods and Goddesses,
- Native American Indians of the Northeast, Southeast and West
