Day Four: You Wouldn’t Want to Be Joan of Arc: A Mission You Might Want to Miss by Fiona Macdonald

Continuing on my nonfiction kick for day four I read You Wouldn’t Want to Be Joan of Arc. This is part of the You Wouldn’t Want to be…series. This is a great series that makes history so accessible for kids and provides the facts and information in a fun format. The books talk about all the gross, horrible things that people had to live through during certain periods of history, historical events or famous historical figures. The book I read is about Joan of Arc and why being her might not have been so much fun. There is the obvious, being burned at the stake that would be a bit of a downer, but it gives lots of facts and information about why growing up in the 1400’s during the Hundred Years War was a pretty awful time to live. One of the handy hints listed in the book “Don’t be brave! If enemies attack, don’t try to fight back. Just run away and hide. With luck, you might survive.” The whole series is wonderful, my students love it and it exposes them to history and facts. Plus the cartoon, fun format draws kids to the books and the gross out facts make them think they are not reading history, but they learn something!