Hello everyone, I’m very sorry about the Napoleonic wars blog post and how long it’s taking me to complete it. I have decided to also make an animated video on it so the project will probably revolve around when I can make the video, in the meantime how about you read about this blog post regarding the most recent project that we have been learning about in school.
The project, which shocked me too, was about something historical!!! This project was about the Crusades, specifically the first crusade. It was an improvement in my book anyway. We started the project with, you guessed it, another novel study! This one wasn’t as bad though. It was actually quite interesting. The book, titled The book of the Lion by Michael Cadnum, was about a boy who was eventually conscripted into the crusades. It is quite a good book and I advise you check it out.
The Driving Question
The driving question made me think about things that I hadn’t considered so I have decided to add its own section, the actual question itself was “What can we learn from the past and why does it affect us today”. I believe that the past and our history are very important. We can learn things from the past that can help us prevent mistakes from the past happening in the future. I believe that learning about the past can help people in ways we might not know yet. The thing about the past is that it does have affects on us now, some for good and some for worse. I think that it affects us today because we have chosen to remember things in the past, wether to prevent them from happening again or to try to remember them, in any case, I believe they affect us because we let them.
The Novel Study… Again!
The way we did the novel study was almost exactly like the way we did the earlier novel study in ITEOTWAWKI, if you don’t know what that means, check out that blog post. The role sheets were very similar to those used before and they were used in the same system: we had a week to do them and do the reading then we would have a discussion in our group and repeat. For example…
We did the role sheets as we read the book. Once we had finished the book we then moved one to the main point of this project, we were to create a medieval art work with our face as its center.
The Image
The first step to starting the final image itself, was to learn how to use an app called SuperImpose, which is an image editing app that we got at the start of the year. We started by learning the basics and exploring its features with some images that we had in our photos. Once we had learned how to properly use it we took the main image from our medieval art work chart, which was a previous assignment to help us with understanding medieval world view. After we had chosen our image our next job was to add our face on to a person was in the photo. There were many different ways of doing this. I decided to erase the person’s whole head then add mine in from another photo that I already had. With that out of the way, I then moved on to one of the more tedious parts of the project. See, when we first started learning about world view, there were several main sections that were shown to us, time, belief, value, geography, society, economy and knowledge. I had to incorporate three of the photos from my artwork choice chart that represented three of those categories then add them to my photo that fit the theme. I decided that I was going to try and add as much as I could, I ended up choosing time, geography, value, belief and society. I selected the photos from my choice chart, put them in the photo, made it fit the theme and with that my project was complete! Or so I thought, see the truth was that it had a bigger purpose, which everything in PLP has. What I learned was that we were to create a new photo for the renaissance (which is our next topic), make a triptych about it and to top it all off, a skit that we would present to all of our parents and even some of the school… aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! For the record, I am no Tom Cruise, for that matter, so in my mind… this isn’t going to end well! However, I’m still going to try my best. Stay tuned for that blog post!
The Reflection
This book taught me that many things today are are very similar to back then and things form back then in medieval times have carried over to modern times in force. For example the. Way we run the economic has barely changed from what it was back then, except for some minor modernizations. This has changed how I understood how the medieval world view was back then and how it worked, it also changed how I saw the way that things have changed since then and what has stayed the same, this was a great and eye opening experience and would love to do it or something similar again!
links and Resources
Here are some fun documentary’s about the crusades if you would like to check them out!
There are four other parts to this amazing series done by Extra History, hope you enjoy!