I didn't blog about our homeschooling yesterday. We didn't do a lot. After the loss of the baseball game, I read Connor "Casey at the Bat." That's one of my favorite poems to read aloud, actually. We did more Miquon math, and worked on action verbs in grammar. And, of course, we read history.
Today I planned for us to have no school, but at lunchtime he waylaid me and insisted that we read history. Two chapters.
In An Island Story, the Romans have finally given up on conquering Britain, and have gone home. Much chaos has ensued, eventually resulting in a king named Vortigern coming to the fore. At this time the Britons were having a great deal of trouble with the Scots and the Picts, now that the Romans were no longer manning the forts along Hadrian's wall to keep them to the north. Vortigern, so the story goes, invited some brave Saxon princes and warriors from Jutland to drop by and help them repel the northern barbarians. The Saxons happily obliged, and when they were finished fighting, decided they liked the place and would settle down. This really didn't make anyone happy, except for Vortigern, who married the daughter of one of the Saxon princes.
Connor is begging for more of this story every day. I'm thrilled, as this is one of my favorite times and places in history. I'm going to stop him here, right before we get to Arthur. We're going to backtrack a bit and read Invaded Island by R. J. Unstead and then do some project to consolidate what we've learned about Britain from the stone age to circa 500. Then we'll launch into the coming of Arthur. Heh heh heh. I am having way too much fun with this, can you tell?
I found an intersting site done by a man who things that Vortigern probably got a lot of bad press, and it's not all his fault that the Saxons moved in on Britain.
Searching for a link to Unstead's book, I found this site with several of his stories about important people in ancient/medieval British history.
In other news, we have a new little froggy. We will take him to the creek tomorrow and set him free.
I need to blog about the Boy Scouts, homeschooling accountability, and King Arthur. But now I'm going to have some Hagen Daaz (and I'm not even going to stop to check the spelling) and go to bed.
Posted by Steph at May 30, 2003 12:29 AM