Amazing Time Traveling Adventures – a Medieval History Week: Wars of the Roses

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Welcome to our “Time Travelling Adventures – A Medieval History Week” – an at home week filled with days of relaxed learning and fun activities all themed to the wondrous medieval era! Young knights, squires, princes, and princesses will hardly realize their learning all about history as they embark on a journey of bringing the Middle Ages to life!

For this day, our older ones wanted to tackle the Wars of the Roses. Though quite complex, we tried to simplify it as much with videos, drawing out family trees, and books. We also threw in a few rose-themed crafts just for fun. Read on to check out a fun filled day of learning, reading, crafts, and activities all on amazing castles!

A TYPICAL DAY

All kids are different and you can definitely vary your day with whatever works for you 🙂 Our relaxed & learning fun day kicks off with an introduction to the day’s theme. Then, we move onto videos and themed activities (reading, writing – or story telling – time, crafts, food crafts/snacks, and games or experiments). Feel free to pick and choose whatever works for you 🙂

INTRO

The Wars of the Roses may have inspired some famous books on medieval-fantasy warfare, but is definitely quite a complex subject to tackle. Spanning decades, it was a series of conflicts over the throne of England during the 15th century. One can definitely spend far more than one day on the topic, but we aimed to provide a very high level introduction of the origins of the Wars of the Roses, the main houses, and the symbolism of the roses.

If you’re looking for some more quick facts, check out these great sites:

Wars of the Roses by Ducksters
Wars of the Roses by Britannica Kids
Wars of the Roses Website by the Richard III Society

WHAT TO WATCH

We find that mixing in a short video themed to our day is a great way to add some learning fun! We try to pick informative videos OR mix in a cartoon favorite (where they don’t even realize they’re learning). Below are some of the videos we picked from for the day:

FOOD CRAFTS / SNACKS

What’s more fun than taking a break and having a simple snack??? Including the snack in your theme of the day! We find that our kiddos are more than happy to eat the snacks they create especially when they can arrange them into fun shapes and scenes!

For our snack of the day, we created some red strawberry roses using the tutorial: How To Make Strawberry Roses | Quick & Easy! By Divas Can Cook. Grocery stores also sell white strawberries at some times, but unfortunately we weren’t able to find them, so it was red roses for us..

READING

It’s no secret that reading is an important part of learning, which is why we pick out a handful of books that are fun and filled with some learning tidbits. For our older ones, we have them fill out some worksheets (or let them create some of their own comics) to describe what they read and/or learned! These are a few we picked from for the day:

Wars of the Roses by Michael St John Parker

The Wars of the Roses Site also has some great recommended book lists for different age groups under their Age Group sections, e.g Ages 7-11 Reading List.

WRITING & WRITING PROMPTS

medieval-week-wars-of-the-roses-day-writing-prompt

Just like reading, writing is a great way to keep kids learning by both encouraging their creativity and thought process as well as helping them practice their motor skills and penmanship.

If you’ve got a little one, have them trace words related to the theme: HISTORY, MEDIEVAL TIMES, WARS OF THE ROSES

If you’ve got older children, have them write a sentence or two up to a page or two (depending on their age). Encourage them to be creative AND give reasons for why they made certain choices. This was our writing prompt of the day (and we offered up some examples as well) but definitely pick something your kiddo might be interested in writing about!

Write a short story about a fortune teller who could predict that the War of Roses would last for over 100 years. How would that fortune teller try to warn the kings and nobles?
Imagine there was a third family in the War of the Roses vying for the throne. Write about their struggle to gain power in the shadow of the two larger families of the red and white roses.

CREATE & CRAFT

If you’ve got a crafty little one, a simple craft is a great way to keep them interested in the topic. While their creative juices are flowing, you can also chat about what they’ve learned so far or ask them what else they’re excited about learning!

For our crafts of the day, we gave them a few options that would help them enhance their pretend play or add in some of what they learned.

Painting Roses. Free form paint or follow some guides online – for this one, we let them paint roses as they wanted vs. following the actual symbols of the houses. Alternatively, you can use the house symbols as a guide to draw your own.
Paper Roses. We created a Booklover’s Bouquet for our Vintage Library Party. The techniques can be reused with red and white paper to create a some symbolic paper bouquets 🙂
Coloring Pages. You can find a few printables from some sites online (Wars of the Roses by twinkl, Wars-of-the-Roses-Coloring-Page by My Homeschool Printables). If you’re looking for more options, the Wars of the Roses also has some suggestions on coloring books: Colouring Books

STEAM & STEM ACTIVITIES

While crafting and writing get their creativity and imagination flowing, we also like to add in an activity that gets them thinking along the lines of science, technology, engineering, or math! These engaging activities or experiments are a great way to keep them learning!

Ciphers & Codes: Imagine having to send a secret message via a messenger on horseback half-way across the country! If anything went wrong (the messenger was captured, the letter lost, etc), one would hope that those who intercepted it could not figure out the secret! One way to do this was by encoding the message. Pick a few types of codes or ciphers and have the little ones trade some secret messages on upcoming battles or status of their armies!
Lego Battle Set: Recreate a Lego battle scene using the knights and armor sets from our intro day: Medieval Accessories Knights Block Toy

THANK YOU

Thank you for checking out our at home learning fun article! If you enjoyed this post, please let us know what you think in the comments below and/or follow us on Pinterest

Also, if you haven’t already, check out some of our other Medieval History Week days, History Weeks, Magical Medieval Party, as well as our DIY At Home Camps!

Happy Learning!