Hello there, Aedan here once again. I think I need to come up with a new intro to these posts. I’ll try something new next time… A stitch in time! Our latest project in humanities. I really liked this project and learned so much. This project was about the fall of Rome, Feudalism, Crusades, myths, heroes, and stitching. Yes, that explains the title. Enough with my blabbering, let’s get into the fun stuff.

 

First we learnt about the fall of Rome and the different reasons for it. We read about 8 main reasons and it kept mentioning the split of the Eastern and Western side being one of the biggest problems. This was for many reasons like economic problems and barbarian invasions. “As the gulf widened, the largely Greek-speaking Eastern Empire grew in wealth while the Latin-speaking West descended into economic crisis.” – history.com. After learning about the fall of Rome we did a mini project where we split into three different groups. The Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and the Franks. Our task was to make a freeze frame of what we learned about our assigned group. My group got the Franks and we got to work right away. After some quick research we were ready for our freeze frames. Here’s all of them.

 

After a quick review of the fall of Rome we learnt about Feudalism. Feudalism is a political system that was based on how much land you had and the relationship between the land owner and the people who laboured on the land. It was a system of hierarchy and it depended mostly on your land, but progressed to be about money. In order for Feudalism to work it depended on the three f’s. Fief – the land. Fealty – loyalty. Faith – belief and devotion. Feudalism was held together by the manorial system. The manorial system was the rule of hierarchy. Peasants being in the lower class, well the king is in the ultimate class. We learned lots about Feudalism and hierarchy and it proved very helpful for our final project.

 

 

A big part of our final project was about the crusades. So, obviously we next learnt about the crusades. First, Mrs Willemse taught us about the First Crusade and the different aspects of religion within it. The crusades were mostly about regaining the sacred land. Jerusalem. Jerusalem was very important to many different religions for different reasons and there was bound to be a fight over it sometime. The muslims had possession of Jerusalem for many years and the Christians wanted it back. In 1095 Pope Urban II launched a crusade against the Muslims in hope to regain Jerusalem. Thousands of men, women, and children walked across Europe heading for the holy land. This was the First Crusade. Our big project was going to be about the First Crusade and we learned lots about it and the other crusades.

 

 

Well learning about the crusades, we also learnt about trade routes and all that fun stuff. Instead of explaining about what the trade routes  are I’m just going to show you a little project we did about them. We had to make a diagram that shows how trade lead to towns in the late middle ages. This mini project really helped with the final project. Here’s my trade led to towns diagram.

After learning about trade routes and the crusades we completely switched gears. We started to do research and learn about what a myth is. Overall a myth is just a traditional story, usually explaining the early history of mankind or anything else, and usually involving supernatural beings or events. We did some more research on the difference between myth and history then we started to learn about heroes and the heroes journey.

 

We had to learn about heroes because in our final project we have to make a story about the first Crusade with heroes from the Muslims and Christians. We started off learning about hero myths. We read a short book about a hero named Beowulf. We learnt that different heroes have different characteristics and how to identify them. After that we did one of my favourite parts of the unit. We learnt about a heroes journey. This is basically a guideline to what heroes do in a movie. You’ve probably heard someone say “you’re story should have a beginning, middle and end.” The heroes journey is like that, but way more in depth. I loved learning about it because it’s a very useful thing to keep in mind when writing story’s or anything else. I was also very fascinated by how many movies and books actually follow this guideline. Without further to do, here is the great video on a heroes journey.

After learning about a heroes journey, myths, trade, crusades, Feudalism, and the fall of Rome, it was time for our final project. Our task was to create a story set during the first Crusade. The story would follow a Christian guy and a Muslim guy. Our characters had to interact during the first Crusade. After creating the story we would have to create three quilt squares per character (six in total) that were made using modern art and very basic concepts that represent what happened in the story we made. We had to do this in groups of four.

 

My group consisted of Sam, Paisley, and Jackson. We worked together as a team very strongly and had lots of different strengths. We created first created our story. If you would like to read the story look below. After creating a great story that followed the heroes journey we started to design our squares for our quilt. We designed our quilt squares on our IPads using the apps Paper 53 and Sketches Pro. We made our quilt squares look as similar as possible. After designing the quilt squares we had to print them. Mrs Willemse printed all of our designs onto silk and sent them in to get them quilted. Everything went great until we found out that we accidentally printed one of ours the wrong way. We couldn’t fix it so we just dealt with what we had and our quilt just turned into a funny looking shape. After we finished the quilts we added some finishing touches and were officially finished the unit.

 

Until next time… Aedan Loughr……..

Woah woah woah… Hold on. You think Mrs Willemse would let us have it that easy? During the whole project we had to do a novel study. The novel study was obviously to do with the First Crusade. It was about a boy who went on the First Crusade. I actually found the book pretty interesting once I got into it. The book is called The book of the lion. Since it was a novel study, we had to do research and explanations about the book three times throughout reading it. They also went on a field study. Yes, I said ‘they’. Sadly I couldn’t make it to the field study. Overall I enjoyed this unit and learned a ton from it. Stay tuned because there’s a new post coming this Monday. Mark it in your calendar everyone, and as always…

Until next time… Aedan Loughran