Homeschool Recap 2022/23 – The Kind Kingdom and Beautiful Feet Mash-up
Pierce – 3rd grade, Aliza – 1st grade
Knowing how much we now loved The Peaceful Press, it wasn’t hard to decide what to choose the following year. But, I will admit, at first the thought of learning about Medieval times and European history didn’t really excite me. The kids said the same. But we dove in, trusting that the enthusiasm would follow and knowing that we really wanted to read through The Chronicles of Narnia (which acts as the spine of the curriculum).
Oh my word y’all, within the first week we all admitted that we were so glad we took the chance on this topic of study!
But I’m getting ahead of myself… Each Peaceful Press curriculum has an over all theme (The King Kingdom being European history), but each month also has a sub-theme, if you will. The last three months of Kind Kingdom cover WW1, WW2, and The Cold War. While I truly believe that Jennifer Pepito does a wonderful job of keeping the books on these subjects light and age appropriate, I knew my son was going to really get into studying the wars and would be wanting more books and asking a lot of questions, which I also knew my daughter just wasn’t ready to hear about. So, I decided to stick with it, but only use weeks 1-19.
This left me with a lot of free space… so I decided to add another curriculum I had been eyeing – Beautiful Feet Books, Picture Books Around the World, Part II. This beautiful guide is a geography/cultures/literature study of South America and Europe using, you guess it, picture books! Books being our favorite thing, I knew we couldn’t go wrong. But, we used only the European section of the book… goodness, are you following all this?!
I ultimately decided to intersperse the country studies in with the King Kingdom study, while continuing to read through the entire Narnia series as we went along. So the year looked like this:
| Curriculum | Topic | # of Weeks |
| BFB | Great Britain and Scotland | 1 |
| KK | Month 1 – Middle Ages | 4 |
| KK | Month 2 – Kings and Queens | 4 |
| Both | Shakespeare | 1 |
| BFB | Italy | 1 |
| KK | Month 3 – Renaissance | 4 |
| BFB | Sweden and Denmark | 1 |
| BFB | Germany | 1 |
| KK | Month 4 – Reformation | 2 |
| KK | Month 5 – Exploration | 4 |
| BFB | Spain | 1 |
| BFB | Ireland | 1 |
| BFB | France | 2 |
| BFB | Holland | 1 |
Anyone still with me? Now that we got the logistics out of the way, I’ll explain each curriculum a bit more…
KIND KINGDOM
As I said earlier, The Chronicles of Narnia is the spine, so we read the whole series -can’t go wrong there! We read the first three aloud, but switched to the audio for the last four, which were so well done. We studied knights, castles, the kings and queens of England, and The Grimm’s Fairy Tales. And it didn’t take long for this to seep into their play time – princess costumes, shields, bows and arrows – they lived and breathed all things Narnia and castles.
Included in the curriculum is copy work, recipes, and timeline cards. We kept the timeline, creating cards to go with all we learned in Beautiful Feet Books as well. At the end of the year we took out our Playful Pioneer cards and made them all into one long time line, so we could see how it all goes together. We memorized the Mnemonic Verses of Monarchs in England, created a United Kingdom salt dough map, and created our own motte and bailey!
AROUND THE WORLD IN PICTURE BOOKS II
So many wonderful books were read about the history and culture of these countries, the kids particularly loved the Anno’s series. We read Hans Christian Andersen, studied Monet, and read Charles Dicken’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ in December. At the end of the guide is a collection of black and white maps, flags, and animals from each country. The kids really enjoyed painting these, learning about the animals, and note-booking about what they had learned. Also included are some recipes, which we had fun attempting.
To add a bit more to the culture aspect of the study, we added in some Rick Steve’s travel videos and watched different episodes of National Geographic’s ‘Europe From Above,’ which my husband and I found to be fascinating. It’s so amazing to me how much my husband and I learn right alongside the kids!
GEOGRAPHY
In addition to the maps we studied through the Beautiful Feet Books guide and Kristin J. Draeger’s ‘Draw Europe’ (used in Kind Kingdom), we also did a floor puzzle map of Europe once or twice a month and filled out a blank map of Europe every month to see how much they had memorized. It’s amazing how much they learned from this, and how fun it was in the process!
It was another rich, simple (after the initial planning), and wonderful year of learning. I particularly loved that it was a great balance of story and facts; both my fact driven son and my whimsical story driven daughter thrived in it all. And their play was so enriched by it all, they had so many adventures (and wore so many costumes), that they probably wouldn’t have without studying this topic. And at this age, that’s the best education you can ask for!
