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.

Naturally, the first thing that popped into my head was Monty Python. Probably not a good suggestion.

On a more serious note, I wonder if some excerpts from BBC series like Tudor Monastery Farm and Tales from the Green Valley might be useful. I know, it's probably not an exact match for the era, but excerpts might give an insight into daily life for common people.

As an activity, build a small brick oven, gather small sticks to heat it, and bake bread?

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:On a more serious note, I wonder if some excerpts from BBC series like Tudor Monastery Farm and Tales from the Green Valley might be useful. I know, it's probably not an exact match for the era, but excerpts might give an insight into daily life for common people.

Oh yes, I'll definitely be using clips from both of those, as well as BBCs Secrets of the Castle, which is more solidly medieval (it shows the building of Guédelon Castle, which is set in the High Medieval 1200s).

As an activity, build a small brick oven, gather small sticks to heat it, and bake bread?

I've through about doing a group project, like dry stone stacking or wattle fencing, or making a cob oven, but I have 5 separate groups of kids (about 12 in each group), and it'd be hard trying to find a place for all of those! The last time I taught the medieval era, the kids made their own wattle-and-daub houses, and that allowed us to make miniatures of pots, blankets, baskets, brooms, etc. But, I had to forgo that big project because storing 70 houses was too much! I'm thinking the big project for my medieval class this year will be book binding, but I'll be doing that toward the end of the year.

If I end up getting mosaic-making stuff (for learning about the fall of Rome and the Eastern Roman Empire), I might just start that with Arthur. But, it'd kind of be nice to do something more "celtic" for this period, so they can remember there were people in England before the Angles and the Saxons. I'm thinking about maybe carving sticks with Ogham, since we see bilingual stone carvings with both Ogham and Latin inscriptions, since the Irish were coming over to England at the same time.

I'm really getting a feeling for why this part of the medieval period is called the "Dark Ages." Like, the oldest British Isles manuscript (that I can find) is from the 700s....we've got nothing from when Rome left in 410 until then (aside from oral history passed on and passed on and then written down). It's hard doing research when there's so little to find!

Not an activity, but I did find these hilarious videos about this period of time:





It doesn't really help me with Celtic/Welsh activities, though. I am leaning toward carving their name in Ogham on sticks and maybe even pencils. I tried carving a pencil edge with scissors, and it didn't work well. But, they could always mark it with a permanent marker. Scissors carve into sticks quite nicely, though.

Because I couldn't find any free Ogham worksheet that I liked, I made my own!. Some of the parents in my homeschool co-op like to take worksheets home, so I try to offer some to go along with every lesson. Sometimes, I can find them online for free, but it's getting harder because (A) a lot of things are paywalled, and (B) a lot of stuff is generated by artificial intelligence. But, hey, I realized I can make worksheets in Word, so I'll just make some for the kids if I can't find them in the wild!