His Treasure Seekers

If you follow my blog regularly, you’re probably already aware that we spent our last four weeks of school going through a Knights and Nobles unit study.  It’s one of the “Once-A-Week Unit Studies” from Homeschool Legacy, and we were blessed with the chance to review it as a fun way to finish up our school year learning more about one of Ian’s favorite subjects.

 

 

About Homeschool Legacy’s Once-A-Week Unit Studies

The Once-A-Week Unit Studies are designed to provide a break during your typical homeschool week with a day to focus on the topic being studied.  Aside from the reading suggestions, which are intended to be used each day, all the activities can be done in a single day, providing a break from your regular curriculum to have fun learning about a specific topic.  The studies are even designed to help Boy Scouts and American Heritage girls meet the requirements for specific merit badges. (Boy Scouts can earn their Art Merit Badge by completing the activities in Knights and Nobles).

There is no prep work required apart from gathering materials and library books (and even the library lists are designed to be as easy to use as possible, arranged numerically by Dewey decimal numbers.)  Simply add the family read-aloud and some free read choices to your school week during the four days you work on your regular curriculum, and then on your chosen day, pick up the unit study and work through the activities, which cover Bible, history, literature, science, art, and various other subjects.  The whole family can work together on unit study day, as they are designed for grades 2-12 (and younger learners can easily tag along).

About Knights and Nobles

Knights and Nobles is available as a paperback book or as a “Grab-N-Go” download from the Homeschool Legacy website.  I received the downloadable 40-page ebook that contains everything needed for a 4-week unit study (with an optional 5th week).

Each week focuses on a different aspect of life in the middle ages and includes a passage of Scripture for family devotions, as well as a novel for the family read aloud (and numerous suggestions for free reading related to the week’s topic).

Week 1: Castles

Learn about how castles (and cathedrals) were designed and built and have a family night playing games popular back in the middle ages.

Week 2: Kings and Queens

This week covers topics like King Arthur, illuminated manuscripts, and the tradition behind “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.”

Week 3: Knights

Archery, catapults, coats of arms, and chivalry are all discussed in this week on knights.

Week 4: Life on a Manor

Learn about the different jobs people did to help keep a manor running and what life was like for those who lived there.

An optional fifth week involves preparing a traditional medieval feast.

Our Experience

Ian has always been fascinated by the subject of knights and castles, so we were really excited to get a chance to review this unit study, especially because we’ll be covering the middle ages next year in our history cycle.  Ian’s at the young end of the target age range, just finishing up first grade, so there were a few things we adapted to make it work for our family (like the design for the catapult), but for the most part we were able to follow the study as written.

My favorite part of Knights and Nobles was the use of classic literature for the family read-alouds.  We did well with the first two weeks (The Door in the Wall by Marguerite De Angeli and The Sword in the Tree by Clyde Robert Bulla), but the others (The Story of King Arthur and His Knights by Howard Pyle and Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Gray Vining)  were much longer and seemed more appropriate for older students, so I didn’t even attempt them because I knew it would take us far more than a week to get through each of them.  Instead, we read other stories about King Arthur and used other free-read books throughout those weeks.

There were many helpful free-read suggestions given, and I just printed out the pages with the book lists to take with us to the library.  (I found some of the Dewey decimal numbers were slightly different at our library after looking for books I knew must be there but had to look up after not finding them under the given number.)  Even if we could find every specific book listed, just being in the right section led us to lots of books from which to choose.  I just made one trip to the library and got everything we needed right at the beginning.  Then I set out the books on each topic at the beginning of the week.

I really appreciated the suggestions for being intentional about including dad in what the family is learning.  It was hard not to draw him in, since so much of our family life revolved around the unit study during those four weeks.  We left our basket of related books out in the living room so he was asked to read from them almost every night. The unit study had great suggestions for family movie/game nights.  We even managed a family field trip to Medieval Times to watch knights competing in a tournament.  It got all of us excited about starting up our history lessons when we go back to school in a few months.

If you want to see more about what Knights and Nobles looked like for our family, check out the last four Weekly Wrap-Ups from our 2014-15 school year.  Also, be sure visit the Schoolhouse Review Crew site to see what my fellow Crew members thought of this unit study and many of the others available from Homeschool Legacy.