Coming soon - Flint & Fable
The story of Britain for young readers.
Flint & Fable – for stories, for children, for learning.
For the past three months I have been writing about the ongoing human need to make things with care. From stained glass and illuminated manuscripts to a world made by a philologist who loved languages more than fame.
Last week, I discovered an almost forgotten (here in the UK) Victorian educator who believed that children are born persons – not empty vessels to be filled, but living minds that deserve the finest ideas we can offer them. Charlotte Mason.
Finding this incredible woman has been a catalysing moment for me, and she is the inspiration behind my new publication.
I am particularly passionate about stories for children.
My other passion is history, and I strongly believe that history should be passed on to children via story.
Charlotte Mason is the inspiration behind my new publication, Flint & Fable. It will become a platform for a serialised narrative history of Britain, written specifically for young readers age 10 to 13.
It is not a textbook or a worksheet; it is a living book – history told as a serialised story, the way history always used to be told.
I have created Flint & Fable because I firmly believe that children who encounter history as story remember it for the rest of their lives.
Flint & Fable launches with the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Viking longships, moves through the Norman castles and the medieval cathedrals, through the Tudors and the Stuarts and the Civil War, and arrives at the revolution that settled, once and for all, that even kings must answer to the law. This series of approximately fifty stories will cover the period from roughly 800 to 1700 AD, 900 years of how the Britain we know today came into being.
A new instalment will be published every week, each one written to be read in a single sitting of fifteen to twenty minutes – long enough for a child to get lost in, short enough for it to stay with them.
Each article stands alone as a piece of storytelling, but together they will form a single, continuous narrative: the story of an island, from its earliest kingdoms to the birth of the modern world.
The first instalment begins with a king hiding in the Somerset marshes in the winter of 878, watching the smoke rise from a burning country, wondering whether everything he has built is already lost.
His name is Alfred, King Alfred, and his story is where England begins.
Coming Soon
Flint & Fable - for stories, for children, for learning.
Awesome. I was just telling my husband that a lot of Charlotte Mason living books these days ironically skew American, as that’s where she is most popular!
I love this!! My daughters are a bit too young, but I will absolutely be reading this myself!