• What research did you need to complete in order to understand these texts? 
  • I would definitely need to read more about these battles and time period because I was not familiar with some of the references. 
• How would you make these texts relevant to your classroom? 
  • To be honest, these texts would be VERY difficult to use with 6th graders, so I'm not sure that I would be able to use them without modifying them quite a bit. I know DIG (formerly SHEG - Stanford History Education Group) has professional development on how to take primary sources like this and modify them for younger audiences. However, I think these two excerpts would be pretty hard for my students to analyze and digest even with modifications. 
• What information would you share with your students when you presented these texts? 
  • Most likely I would not use these texts as mentioned above or I would use a shorter/modified excerpt. I think the interesting portion to use with my students would be from the second excerpt at the end where it talks about Christians and Jews preferring Muslim rule over that of Heraclius. 
• Discuss how you would contextualize these readings for your students in a larger unit that you teach on medieval history.  
  • In our unit on the Islamic Empires, we talk about the connections between Christians, Jews, and Muslims as "People of the Book". I would probably focus on that topic and have students look more closely on these 3 groups and how they interacted during the medieval era. 

By: Kaitlyn King