Living Sola Gratia: Weekly Wrap Up - The week we studied Knights

This past week we finally learned about castles, cathedrals, knights and the code of chivalry. We have been meaning to read about them for the last two weeks but for one reason or another we had not gotten to them.

We read a great little picture about knights called Knights in Shinning Armor by Gail Gibbons. The kids really enjoyed it. I thought it gave a pretty detailed picture of the life of a knight. During the reading of the book all the got dubbed a knight and had the title Sir added to their names. They must have really enjoyed this because they continued it even when the neighbor kids came over the play later in the day.

After reading the book the kids decided to make their own swords and shields from all of the Stampin' Up! card stock rotting away in my craft room : )

Today they are going to mount their horse (bikes) and practice jousting with lances (pool noodles of course!). They really looking forward to this, I am just going to be praying that they are no casualties.

This week we also read in Story of the World 2 about the code of chivalry, which I thought was pretty interesting. Then in Medieval World, we read more on castles and cathedrals. We had read a little about castles last week and we were blessed with some huge boxes which the kids used to build a castle, draw bridge and all. Thanks again Erica!

This is kinda the only shield that survived the battle long enough to have it's picture taken.

As we read this week, the kids colored print outs from a medieval times coloring book for their history notebook. We also did oral narration and discussion.
The kids watched the cartoon Robin Hood. We discussed the stealing that Robin and his men did and whether it was pleasing to the Lord. I was happy to hear them say that even though giving to the poor is a good thing, stealing it not. Yay!

We also got back into our Apologia Astronomy book, we finished up lesson 1 and did most of lesson 2. We just started this not to long ago and I plan to continue this in the summer. If you have ever done the Apologia Astronomy, then you know that lesson one has you use balloons to make the planets to hang from your ceiling. Yeah, that didn't work out so well for us - me lovely kids used up all the balloons for a water fight so I resorted to paper planets. Such is life I guess.

The girls had their last book club on Wednesday evening, they just finished reading Treasures of the Snow. Their WONDERFUL book club teacher invited a couple from our church that had lived in Switzerland AND knew Patricia St. John (the author). From what I hear, they also knew
Corrie Ten Boom, a favorite of my girls, so that was an added bonus.

Last but definitely not least, we started a new read a loud called Mr. Pipes. I am diggin' this book! We are reading the first one in the series (there are 4). It is a historical fiction, with a good story line, that teaches about hymns and where they originated. It is put out by Christian Liberty Press. So far so good!