This publication used to be called Flint & Fable, but now it’s called Horse Guard, and it’s heading in a new direction.
Britain: The Story of an Island for Young Readers – the serialised narrative history that follows Churchill’s account of the British Isles, written for children, continues exactly as before. Twenty articles are already published and more are coming, and this will not change until the series is complete.
What has changed is that Horse Guard is becoming broader. Alongside The Story of an Island, there will be new content.
What are the Horse Guard Heritage Workbooks?
The Heritage Workbooks are free printable PDFs, with each one covering a single subject – a person, an invention, a place, a craft, a folktale, or a tradition – each one comes with everything you need to turn it into a lesson, teaching aid, and keepsake.
Inside each workbook you will find:
A brief introductory story.
Key facts
Comprehension questions and discussion questions
Further reading, and places you can actually visit
A page or two of cut-outs: photographs, diagrams, portraits, and maps
The workbooks are meant to be cut up.
Print the pages, read the story together, work through the questions, and then get the scissors out. The entire workbook is intended to be taken apart and cut up.
Some children may want to create a neat notebook with everything squared off and labelled. Others will build something closer to a junk journal – layered, overlapping, stuffed with torn paper, string, stamps, tickets, pressed leaves and whatever else they’ve collected. There is no right or wrong way of approaching it. The point is that the child chooses what to keep and how to arrange it, and in doing so they learn, and over time, the notebook becomes their own book of British heritage that they have made themselves.
A word on who it’s for.
The content leans towards what interests boys. This isn’t accidental. Boys are falling behind in reading and attainment, and there appears to be very little out there that grabs their interest. But nothing in the workbooks is exclusively for boys. Girls will find plenty to interest them as well, and the workbooks are being created for families to use together, across a range of ages.
The first workbook is attached below. It tells the story of Frank Whittle, the mechanic’s son from Coventry who invented the jet engine. Many British children have never heard of him.
More will follow. They’re FREE, and if you find them useful, please subscribe.
Best wishes Vincent Shaw