Activities for Studying Early Medieval Briton (and King Arthur!)

First off: If anyone has ideas for hands-on, living history activities for studying early medieval Brittonic/Welsh people, I'd love to hear them!

This year I'll be teaching Medieval History, which I'm super excited about. I'm having way too much time learning and prepping for it.

Because I want my kids to learn about primary sources, I made a worksheet with the four earliest mentions of Arthur (yes, the King Arthur of legend) and I made a coloring sheet based off of the art made by Bernadette Banner and The Welsh Viking.

On the worksheet, I made a coloring picture of this 6th century Roman Spatha sword. It's Merovingian/French, but it was really hard finding swords from this time period, and this one was so pretty!



The upper pommel of the sword was hard to figure out the details of, so I used some pommel images from this webpage about Migration Era swords.

Gotta give credit where credit is due, so here's the video by Bernadette Banner drawing the picture I turned into my coloring page:



And, here's The Welsh Viking's video on Arthur:

For those wanting a quick video to show kids about the historicity (or lack thereof) on King Arthur, here's a good little video:

I just added another worksheet--this one is for "designing your own Excalibur." Once side has primary source images of 5 different early-medieval swords. The second page has a section for designing your own sword.