First Grade, History, Set One

In addition to Child's History of the World, we have used these resources:

• Long, Long Ago by Michael Berenstain -- I used this book our first day to refresh K.'s memory of what we learned last year, and lay the foundation for this year. I did not read the whole book to her, but stopped at the Renaissance.
• The Story of King Arthur and His Knights retold from the Howard Pyle original by Tania Zamorsky
• Life in a Medieval Monastery by Marc Cels -- we mostly looked at the pictures and read the bold writing. We found it interesting that the only had one meal a day during the winter. We decided that we wouldn't have liked that.
• The Two Brothers by Minfong Ho and Saphan Ros -- this is a folk tale from Cambodia
• Pangur Ban by Mary Stolz -- I've started reading this during our family reading time.
• Manners and Customs in the Middle Ages by Marsha Groves -- this book has lots of pictures. If you just look a 2 or 3 pages a day, you can read all the information. After seeing the pictures and reading about the knights, K. wanted to act it out. We also acted out Wedding Customs and Baptism (although, since we are Baptist, we talked about how this does not save a person, but made it more like a ceremony where they name the child).

• The Crafts and Culture of a Medieval Monastery by Joann Jovinelly and Jason Netelkos -- we looked through this book, sometimes reading, sometimes just looking at the pictures and their explanation. Then I let K. pick one craft to do (many were above her skill level, but there were two or three that were easy). She decided we would make pretzels. We had a good time and they tasted good!

• The Barefoot Book of Pirates retold by Richard Walker -- K. really enjoyed hearing all the stories, but the best part (to her) was acting them out after we read them.