Weekly book shelf, 2/21/14

We're still hanging out with the Celts this week (SOTW2 ch. 2), focusing more this week on the birth of the legend of King Arthur, which came from much, much earlier than I had ever imagined.

King Arthur: The Evolution of a Legend, is one of the only kids books I found that traced the Arthurian legend to its real beginning in the century following the fall of Rome. Like all the other books in the "Life and Times" series, this one not only presents factual information as we know it, but prevailing theories as well. And it sets the stage well, describing the way of life, traditions, and beliefs that were customary at the time. We only focused on the first part of the book. We'll check it out again when we revisit the evolving legend again in the high middle ages.

And we looked at some other early Celtic legends, too. They are simply told in this compendium, and some of the phrasing is weird. It's hard for me to tell if that's the book, or the legends themselves. We only read a few of them before moving on, but that was enough to give us an idea.

We also watched another episode from the series we started last week: "The Celts". Episode 4 of the series, From Camelot to Christ, covers some of the beginnings of the King Arthur story. I shared my thoughts on this video series last week, and this episode was equally as pretty and momentous, and just as evasive with regards to real information. But it corroborated information from the other video we watched and loved...

Back to our favorite history video guy, Michael Wood. His "In Search of Myths and Heroes" series has an episode about King Arthur that, of course, we loved. Unsurprisingly we never find King Arthur, but it's a great video.

In science this week we covered more of the body systems, focusing on the digestive and endocrine systems (still BFSU1 lesson B9). I'll say it again, but only briefly, this series is really comprehensive without being long-winded, and it's neatly presented, without too many distractions.

In literature study this week, Calvin read and took notes on The House at Pooh Corner. He read it first a few years ago, but wanted to reread it, and I thought an easy and heartwarming read would be good since we've been busy, and battling illnesses. These books are so sweet, they're like comfort food.

And in his free time this week, Calvin picked up 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He's been wanting to read it for a while and this week he utterly devoured it. Un-put-downable.