Project 180: The Stuarts

It seemed about time we did another history project. Although history has been incorporated into other projects (e.g., Project 166: Animal Farm) and we'd done Project 139: A History of Music, the last project that looked explicitly at a historical period was almost a year ago with Project 134: World War II. 

 We decided to look at the Stuarts as we had previously looked at the surrounding periods (see Project 69: The Tudors and Project 104: The Georgians), and it gave an opportunity to consolidate and revisit some of the other projects we did before Sam started home education (e.g., Project 108: The Great Fire of London, Project 77: Shakespeare, Project 5: English Civil War).

As well as making use of a lot of history books, we incorporated science, literature and music. 

We read about the gunpowder plot, and then followed some instructions from the Horrible Science kit (see Project 19: Science and Chemistry) to make our own 'fireworks' with food colouring:

We read an abridged Othello, and made use of the the BBC resources to learn and sing songs about Macbeth. Finally we watched a fictional account of Shakespeare's early years from the team behind Horrible Histories. It wasn't as family friendly as we'd hoped, but that's what we get for straying into the Tudor period!

Next Project: Cars