C11 is doing her presentation at the feast on medieval fashions. She had made a fabulous start, creating a hand sewn costume for her medieval peasant doll. It had taken her much longer than anticipated, leaving only three weeks until the date of the feast to have her next costume completed by. This costume was…
Category: History – Middle Ages
Medieval Feast: Meringue Swan Subtleties
For more information about medieval subtleties see here L11 had a few different ideas for subtleties (small favours served between courses). She has already made some marzipan 'War of the Roses' roses subtleties, now it was meringue swans. First she whipped up some egg whites and caster sugar and piped the meringues onto her design…
Medieval Fashions: Peasant Girl Design Board
Right at the beginning of this project I had encouraged C11 to make a design board in order to create a clearer idea of the clothes she wished to make for her dolls. Here is the initial sketch: This helped C11 to visualise and consolidate the ideas in her head. They also gave me a…
Medieval Fashion: Peasant girl
C11 has chosen to study medieval fashions for her project. Her intention was to make clothes for a medieval peasant, lady and princess. However, it has been much harder than she anticipated, and it has taken her almost eight weeks to do the peasant doll. We have decreased her wortk, therefore, to a peasant doll…
Medieval Feast: Invitations
It was essential that the invitations to our medieval banquet were designed, made and sent to their recipients in time for an answer to be given. Therefore, this was one of L11's very first projects to be completed. L11 had already jotted her ideas down for the invitations during one of her project sessions. I encouraged…
The Angelicscalliwag’s Magna Charta
Straight after our democratic meeting, we discussed a few other points and I left the children to make up their own Magna Charta for our home and they wrote it on our white board. I had to giggle at some of the stuff they came up with: The next day, as part of his writing…
Law Study: Hands on Democratic Rule
Having had a highly successful demonstration of what an autocratic rule is, we attempted to replicate the democratic rule. We had already learnt about how the House of Lords and the House of Commons was first formed. I found a couple of clips from YouTube for both, primarily to show the difference between the two,…
Law Study: Hands-on Autocratic Rule!
When I shared with the children what I had planned to help them to understand autocratic rule they were a little excited! In fact they nagged me incessantly because they wanted to do the activity immediately. Everyday they plotted and planned and nagged until I finally gave in and we proceeded with the activity. I'm not sure one…
Leadership Study: King John
I thought King John might be an interesting leader to do a study on because, in general, he is considered a poor leader. We have only ever looked at renowned strong leaders before, so I knew this would be a little different. I wasn't in the mood to study King John, to be honest, so I was…
King John and the Magna Charta: Resources
As you all know, February is my least favourite time of home school, on account of a severe lack of energy. When I saw King John was coming up on the horizon, hibernation for its duration seemed like the only sensible solution. Of course humans don't, as a rule, tend towards hibernation, and I figured…
Medieval Feasts: Subtleties
Subtleties or entremets (old French meaning 'between servings) are works of art using food and story telling and which vary between simple frumenty to more elaborate models of fruit filled castles or allegorical figures from literature. They traditionally marked the end of one course and the beginning of another. Towards the end of the middle ages subtleties…
Progress Report on the Individual Projects
This year I asked the children to choose one area of the historical period which would interest them enough to dig deeper on their own. The task was to put together a project on their chosen area and present it at our final medieval presentations in April (ish) time. They needed to come up with…
Islamic Scientist Study: Alhazan
Source Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham (965 - 1040 AD) was an Arab scientist, polymath, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher. His speciality was optics and he showed accurately how the eye worked and used the focal point of magnification to make the fore-runner of the pin hole camera, called the camera obscura, proving his theory…
Art Study – Medieval Illumination
Our artist study this term will be the Limbourg Brothers. They are famous for their 'Book of Hours' which is full of some of the most beautiful illuminations. Before we studied their work in depth, I had decided we would look at medieval illuminations as an art form first to become familiar with them as…
Creating an Illuminated Letter
This week we begun our study into the illuminated letter. This is as a prelude to our artist study on the Limbourg brothers. I shall be doing a full post on Friday, but today we made our own illuminated letters and had loads of fun. Yesterday I had prepared them for this activity by reading through and letting…