Day 328: Drawing abilities
Oct. 18th, 2012 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66That was the randomly generated topic (well, it was the topic after ten non-starters, many of them repeated non-starters).
I love to draw. I love to build drawing into my classes, which is one aspect of teaching middle school versus high school that is a plus. Maybe I could work drawing into high school history classes. But probably not as often. Anyway. The Middle Ages in Europe is fun to teach, and right now students are working on skits to dramatize different aspects of lives in late medieval towns (guilds, merchants, home life, medicine, crime and punishment, and leisure activities), which will be interesting to see. But the mini-project right before this was having them create illuminated manuscripts. I bought parchment (-like) paper and copied an outline onto it for their final drafts, and I got some nice ones. I decided they had to write their letters in 1175, and had to pretend to be either Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine or someone related to her (first husband Louis VII of France, daughters Marie and Alix, both already married by then to, respectively, the Comte de Champagne, and the Comte de Blois; second husband Henry II, who had imprisoned her in 1173 for conspiring with her sons to rebel against him; any of her seven living children with Henry II, Young Henry, Young Eleanor, Geoffrey, Richard, Matilda, Joan, or John, or Henry II's illegitimate half-sister, Marie of France, who was at that point the Abbess of St. Edwards Abbey in Shaftesbury, and the author of some of the earliest romantic poetry. They had to pick one person to be and one person to write to -- oh, I added, for the boys who desperately wanted to be knights, Sir William Marshall, who was Eleanor of Aquitaine's Marshal and Household Knight-at-Arms. I gave them a handout with some basic information about these people, and their ages on one side, and a model letter on the other side. At home, I made my own, and here is my two page illuminated manuscript letter.*
And here is the second page. Kids only had to do a one page letter, and most of them wrote approximately three times as big as me, and with wide lines. They are not accustomed to writing long letters, at all.
*full disclosure; I read E. L. Konigsberg's A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver when I was ten or eleven, and its impact has never faded. The Alison Weir factual biography of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine did not teach me much more than that YAF historical novel.
I love to draw. I love to build drawing into my classes, which is one aspect of teaching middle school versus high school that is a plus. Maybe I could work drawing into high school history classes. But probably not as often. Anyway. The Middle Ages in Europe is fun to teach, and right now students are working on skits to dramatize different aspects of lives in late medieval towns (guilds, merchants, home life, medicine, crime and punishment, and leisure activities), which will be interesting to see. But the mini-project right before this was having them create illuminated manuscripts. I bought parchment (-like) paper and copied an outline onto it for their final drafts, and I got some nice ones. I decided they had to write their letters in 1175, and had to pretend to be either Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine or someone related to her (first husband Louis VII of France, daughters Marie and Alix, both already married by then to, respectively, the Comte de Champagne, and the Comte de Blois; second husband Henry II, who had imprisoned her in 1173 for conspiring with her sons to rebel against him; any of her seven living children with Henry II, Young Henry, Young Eleanor, Geoffrey, Richard, Matilda, Joan, or John, or Henry II's illegitimate half-sister, Marie of France, who was at that point the Abbess of St. Edwards Abbey in Shaftesbury, and the author of some of the earliest romantic poetry. They had to pick one person to be and one person to write to -- oh, I added, for the boys who desperately wanted to be knights, Sir William Marshall, who was Eleanor of Aquitaine's Marshal and Household Knight-at-Arms. I gave them a handout with some basic information about these people, and their ages on one side, and a model letter on the other side. At home, I made my own, and here is my two page illuminated manuscript letter.*
And here is the second page. Kids only had to do a one page letter, and most of them wrote approximately three times as big as me, and with wide lines. They are not accustomed to writing long letters, at all.
*full disclosure; I read E. L. Konigsberg's A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver when I was ten or eleven, and its impact has never faded. The Alison Weir factual biography of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine did not teach me much more than that YAF historical novel.