How we homeschooled today #93

Stepping back in time to Medieval London, and three posts elsewhere you might enjoy (or might not!)

A post you might enjoy…

Will Orr-Ewing

’s latest post has lots of interesting education bits and pieces to explore. As per my Note earlier, he covers topics like screens in schools, a talk he gave to the Eton Philosophy Society on CS Lewis, a plan for a Parents’ Union à la Charlotte Mason, and more. He’ll also be sharing a guest post with How We Homeschool soon—watch this space!

And a post you might not…

Joshua Doležal

is alarmed by what he sees as a ‘brigade’ of homeschoolers. You might find yourself raising an eyebrow at sentences like this one:

I watched my daughter rocking the Macarena with her friends, dashing to the gym for a little dodgeball, then crashing the snack table for refreshment. If she were homeschooled, she’d have missed out on all that fun and the belonging that comes with it.

I think it’s always good to consider others’ viewpoints. See what you think!

And a post you might enjoy in spite of yourself…

If I told you someone wanted to improve maths education in the UK and felt that the National Curriculum is not a great way to teach children maths or to teach them to think, you might be interested, right? But if I told you that person was

Dominic Cummings

, you might not be. Well, it is, and I’ll be brave and say I’m with him. This post includes a selection of maths books recommended to Dominic (not his own recommendations) which I will certainly be exploring myself. Go on, have a look…

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How we homeschooled today

Today we went into London for a bit of Medieval history. Regular readers will know we are focusing on the Medieval period this year and London is a pretty amazing place to do this. Here’s what we saw/did/talked about, but bear in mind that the children may not have taken this all in.

• We started at Smithfield market, which has been a meat market since perhaps the tenth century and still is (for now). It was originally called ‘Smooth Field’ and was a grassy plain outside the city boundary. Names like Cow Cross Street and Cock Lane hark back to the days of animals being driven to market here. In 1390 Richard II held an enormous tournament here with 60 knights coming to joust.

• Then to the memorial to the Marian martyrs, which commemorates the Protestants put to death in the reign of Mary I (Bloody Mary, 1553-58).

• From here we could see the Tudor gatehouse which survived the Blitz because it had been hidden away behind a Georgian facade and forgotten about. We imagined what London would have been like when there were thousands of buildings like this one:

  

• Onwards, to St Bartholomew’s the Great, London’s oldest surviving church, founded in 1123. We talked about the founder Rahere’s pilgrimage to Rome and his vision of the saint who, helpfully, had even chosen the location for the hospital and church Rahere founded—a saint and a realtor! We talked about Henry VIII and the Reformation and how much of the church had been destroyed.

  

  St Bartholomew the Great, 900 years old this year. Via Wikipedia

• We walked down Cloth Fair (which was still a site for cloth sellers until the 1950s) and saw number 41, one of the few City buildings to survive the Great Fire of 1666.

• Into Charterhouse Square, used as a plague pit (burial ground) during the 1348 Black Death epidemic. Then into the Charterhouse itself, founded as a monastery in 1371 and in business until Henry VIII came along (him again). The small museum has a skeleton from the plague pit, which my daughter loved but my son found creepy. Short diversion from history for a biology lesson with the skeleton. In the space of a generation the plague reduced London’s population from 100,000 to 20,000.

• We talked about why the Black Death isn’t a problem in London any more, which took in improved sanitation as well as genetics.

• Final stop, Barbican Children’s Library, where they borrowed far too many books which they read all the way home.

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