Homeschool Highlights: Knights and Chivalry

I loved reading my kids chapter 17 from Story of the World Volume 2. I could see some lights going on in Jake's head as we learned about knights and chivalry. (Ahhh, finally some reinforcement for what we try to teach him about opening doors for people and being selfless!) It was wonderful. I also loved reading about how knights were taught loyalty to God. That's exactly what I want my children to feel--loyalty to God.

So we decided to celebrate all of this knowledge with a little family jousting tournament that weekend. We started by going to the fabric store, choosing some ribbons and posterboard, and making some princess hats to match my girls' gowns. (The idea for this came from Days of Knights and Damsels by Laurie Carlson.) Our little ladies had to be properly attired for the tournament, of course!

I told the kids a jousting tournament would be a big event, possibly with some fancy medieval food. We used the marzipan recipe from Days of Knights and Damsels. (This is really a recipe for a butter cookie, but we had fun shaping them to look like marzipan. We also looked at pics of marzipan online. My kids were suitably impressed.)

We shaped oranges, bananas, strawberries, and pears. 

Friday night we had our little jousting tournament.

Grace turned out to be a fierce foe, princess gown and all.

Cameron wore our dollar-store knight helmet for the occasion

Abby has the facial expressions down!

                           

As you can see, our girls wanted to join the action, gowns and all. It seems our re-enactments are never very authentic, but I think we usually have fun anyway!