We have been looking at the Hundred Year War (well actually 116 years) between France and England in our History. It is a fascinating period. We have looked at quite a few of the English characters in detail so I thought it would be good to highlight a French character from this period and of course Joan of Arc was the immediate choice. (My daughter enjoys learning about strong female historical figures). We did read about her in our History book but I wanted to do more than that so I had a quick search and realized Activity Village has included her in their Historical figures section – Joan of Arc for kids.
They have a number of great pages to choose from. We started with one of our favourites the Comprehension pages (I am always a huge fan of non-fiction comprehensions because kids read factual texts and then get to practice their writing, spelling and punctuation when they answer the questions.)
If you don’t want to do a comprehension then we recommend downloading the factsheet.
After completing the comprehension the kids created their own mini Joan of Arc booklets. I am a massive fan of these little booklets. I always tend to print them out and my kids enjoy the fact that afterwards they have their own mini-collection of booklets they have created (they have a massive collection of these booklets which include lots of historical figures and fact booklets about a large number of different animals).
When we started using these booklets it was just a great way to encourage the kids to write but now I am finding another great reason for using them. My one kiddo struggles to summarize facts, she loves the detail and really struggles to leave out bits of detail just because she finds those details so interesting. But being able to summarize information into key points is a vital skill so we are now using these booklets as a great tool for her because there is only so much space to write in so she has to condense everything and just stick to the key facts.
And then we had a go at the Prosecution vs defence page. I choose this page because it fitted in really well with a theme of different points of view which we have been talking a lot about while we covered the hundred year’s war. This period is a perfect example of how 2 different sources can talk about the exact same event but if one is an English source and one if a French source they are totally different. And I thought thinking about the defence (from the French point of view) and the Prosecution (from the English point of view) would be a great activity to enforce this idea.
But there are lots of other great worksheets that you could use some of our old favourites are the diary one and the interview one.
And finally we had a go at drawing our own Joan of Arc characters.
I always enjoy these famous people sections from the Activity Village website. There are always so many options for activities.
ofamily learning together 