Over the summer the children have continued with their daily quiet times. This is something we have insisted on with all five children from the moment they stop napping. B2 is still napping. A4 has her quiet time in my room, listening to a book on CD and playing with her quiet time toys. The older three read for an hour. As they also have ample time to read before bed, this summer I suggested they got a head start on their school reading. I had a heavy reading load, all linked to the crusades in some shape or form, and I had wondered if they would manage to read them all. I needn’t have worried, because they have devoured them and I even ordered some extra ones to keep them going. This is definitely a period which has captured their imaginations with C10 suggesting they set up a crusade camp in our back garden! I thought I would share with you the books they have read. Please do read my post about our reading criteria before you accept my recommendation. That which I consider fine for my family you may disagree with! Here they are in no particular order:
The children are very close to having read all of these, with just a couple of the Pagan chronicles left. I have a few non fiction books which, although we won’t read in their entirety, I will be reading aloud from periodically to enrich our studies:
The following book I will use for its primary evidence content:
And finally, we will use this book as part of our leadership studies, comparing leaders Saladin and Richard I:
We also have a few dvds to show the children.
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We have prewatched the Kingdom of Heaven and there are scenes we are unhappy with, so we will either allow clips to be watched for teaching purposes or allow the film with parts of it omitted (the film has a rating of 15). My goal in watching these was to have one of our historical discussions about the portrayal of historical events in film and the accuracies (or otherwise) of those portrayals.
Roll on our new term!
05/10/2013 Edited to add that I have removed the Pagan books because as the series progressed the children found some of the language to be offensive. There fore, whilst the story gripped my children I can’t in all honesty recommend them.