Middle Ages, Knights and Castles

As we are going through Mystery of History Volume 2 this semester, we spent some time concentrating on Knights and Castles during the Middle Ages. We used the following resources for this study:


We used the lapbook and notebooking pages from homeschoolshare on Castle Diary and the Magic Tree House Knights Research Guide.

We started out by reading all the resources, then we took the next week reviewing the information and putting it into lapbook format. (The pictures are mostly of Nicolas's book, unless otherwise noted.)


We started out talking about the Feudal system - King, Baron, Knight, Serf - and what our family feudal system might be - God, Dad, Mom, Kids. We also talked about our governmental feudal system - President, VP, Senate/Congress, Governor, Mayor, etc.

Then we talked about the process of becoming a knight and how children from royal blood were sent away from their families at age 6 or 7 to begin studying to become a knight, and, if found worthy and rich enough, they were knighted about about age 21.

They copied 10 points in the Code of Chivalry - those that they can still keep today. (Some were outdated, so I read them, but they didn't copy them.)


As we began discussing Castles, I had them each draw a castle (Alex's is the bottom one.)


We located the 4 main parts of a castle - wall, keep, tower and moat - and discussed the ways the castle was protected by the sentries.
One of the most interesting subjects was the knight's armor and weapons. If my boys enjoyed crafts, we would've made some, but they don't enjoy doing things like that, so we just looked at pictures. We compared the knight's armor with the Armor of God and what each piece from Ephesians means in our walk with God.

We also looked at the table manners from medieval times compared to ours. They ate with their fingers, through their table scraps on the floor and spit on the floor. (Can't imagine the clean up!)

We ended by writing diamante or diamond poems. A diamond poem is composed with a noun as the subject of the poem for the first line, 2 adjectives that describe that noun, 3 verbs ending in -ing, 2 more adjectives and concludes with another noun that could be a synonym of the first noun. Here are the boys' poems:

Swords
Sharp, long
Killing, fighting, practicing
deadly, double edged
Weapon
by Nicolas

Knights
Bold, brave
Jousting, fighting, peacemaking
Helpful, heroic
Hero
by Alex

Here are the boys' coat of arms they created that I found online. (Alex's is the second one pictured.) After looking at our family's coat of arms, we discussed the different colors and symbols that were generally used. This worksheet was split into 6 different parts. They were to draw something for a specific category in each part. -who am I? - what makes me happy - what makes me sad - what do I want to be when I grow up - what are my hobbies or interests - my favorite place.