Throughout grade 8 we have been covering history according to their timeline. Our last unit starred the Renaissance as the main character. We learned all about the rise of towns and how much change they created. We each had to make a diagram showing reasons why towns were made instead of continuing with regular trade. For my first draft I didn’t make much of a diagram at all I mainly just made and image with a few pieces of text but my second draft explains the subject much more.

After we understood towns we moved on to the Italian city states that led to the changing ideas of art, literature, math, science, humanism, and, much more. These ideas that are so common and normal now were so revolutionary and innovative at the time and throughout this unit I was able to get a feel for how much this time period influenced everyone’s life today. Without all of these people from the renaissance times we wouldn’t have plays, we wouldn’t have paintings, there would be no scientific method, and we all would’ve just relied on God. One of the most important factors of the renaissance is believing that you can do something without the help of god and you can do what you wish. To help us remember what we learned at the beginning of the unit and to make sure we understood everything we had a question to answer every lesson we had.

The next step for this unit involved three basic things to think about. The changing ideas, the spread of those ideas, and how they impacted our world today. For example something like writing a novel was so new and different, the printing press was then created which meant that they could be spread, and today novels are used not just as a fun thing for yourself but things used in schools to educate the youth. The first mini project we had on these was to create a triple Venn diagram about a humanist, an artist, and a mathematician or scientist. We had to include what ideas they invented and how they were so different from anything before that time. I got Francis Bacon as my humanist, Lorenzo Ghiberti as an artist, and Otto von Guericke as my scientist.  The main similarity I found between them all was that they all believed that humans should always be looking for something unknown, or to try something they’d never done. The next mini project was about how these changing ideas spread throughout Europe and eventually the world. We were given a thing called a cause and effect blossom which is a diagram in which there is a substantial event in the centre and all the little flower petals are either the cause of it or and effect the event left. My five petals were frescoes (a type of mural), cultural interaction, the printing press, scientists, and the government. They all helped the ideas spread and become well known things for everyone. The last mini project was for the impact of ideas, meaning how these things invented back then are involved in our lives nowadays. For this part were given the task of creating a big idea chart to show some of the most important ideas that came from that era and what they look like now in the modern world. Here are the three sheets.

Once we had all completed these three tasks it was time fort the big one. Our assignment was to create a triptych showing almost everything from the three things we had just done but to make it blend into a nice picture. The left column had to be the change of ideas, the right column had to be the spread of ideas, and the centre was the impact of ideas. When drawing what the rough idea was going to look like I really wanted to have people in the centre column doing an action that would happen nowadays with the materials or technology from back then in the side panels. That sounds confusing but what I mean is that I wanted each section to blend into the other one as if there wasn’t a division at at all.

I am still finishing up a third draft as my previous one was too much of a collage and didn’t make very much sense so I will update this post when I get an approval for my next draft. I really liked this unit because I found myself being very interested in the renaissance. To me it seemed crazy that things we see as ordinary didn’t exist and that some people just thought of that idea one day and now some people’s lives depend on it. Going back to my novel example earlier it shows that teachers and authors get to do what they do because someone thought that writing a novel would be a cool thing to do. The renaissance was truly an amazing period of time.