This will be my last post on the crusades (ye ha! We’re done!). Just to get you in the mood for another information overload to do with the Holy wars, here’s a fun music video which towards the end handily touches on the effects of the crusades. There is one of the videos for almost every period in history. So cool!
In the whole 174 years of the crusades, just 24 years involved fighting. So what on earth did they do for the other 150 years? And how did these ‘extra curriculum’ activities impact the effects of the crusades?
This era in history has caused me to dig really deep to find meaningful, hands on activities; and here I almost came up blank. Maybe a historical discussion? Somehow use a map creatively? Nothing really sparked my imagination, so I left it.
Just recently we had done a study on Battuta, an Islamic explorer, and it was the map we made to show his travels that finally gave me a very simple, inexpensive way to wrap up our studies of the crusades (which I was anxious to do):
I typed out some information pertaining to the effects the crusades had on the European world:
I printed out images of all the effects I could think of to use as cues for the children and gave them photocopies:
They went through these images, explaining to me what each represented and stuck them onto the map, making a collage. Not brilliant by any means, but it would do and was a fun, easy finale to our crusades studies, tying together all we had learnt:
Here is our final map come collage to show the effects of the crusades:
And that is that. No more crusades. I’m not unhappy about that.