The last few months have gone by pretty fast. We’ve completed two projects, our sciematics chemistry coding and we also just completed our middle-ages unit in our humanities class, which is what this post is all about. This project was named This Changes Everything. Throughout this project we were guided by our driving question, “What was life like in the middle ages? How does it compare to today?” To kickstart this project we read a book about the middle-ages called The Book Of The Lion, by Michael Cadnum. We constructed notes to help us understand what we were learning, created a second keynote with a partner to show and example of change and continuity and then presented our keynote in front of the whole class, explaining our examples of continuity and change in the middle ages.

Of course, our teacher Ms. Maxwell launched the project with a bang and us into a medieval simulation to help us get a better grasp of what we would learn for the next few weeks. The simulation assisted our learnings of the feudal system and hierarchy’s. She had us pick random cards, and based of which cards we pulled we were ejected into our roles with no way of moving up. This really helped the entire class realize how hard the dark ages were and just started off the project on the right foot.

To comprehend and establish an extended understanding of the book we would be read for the next few weeks, we developed and identified our specific literacy skills that would guide us throughout the text. By identifying my particular literacy skills, I learned what schedule works for me, how to stay on track and mainly how to use the tools I have to my advantage. One skill that worked well for me was setting up a reading schedule ahead of time so that I could stay on track and manage my other work. 

After recognizing our specific literacy skills relative to ourselves, we dove into the novel, 2 chapters a day to stay on track. The book definitely helped myself and the class understand an in depth view of medieval times and how the times worked. The drop down below is a summary on the Book Of The Lion. Credit HERE for the summary

Edmund is but a simple apprentice working for Otto, the coiner. Turns out Otto isn't so simple, though, and has been hoarding silver from the king and making bad money. And since Edmund works under him, he is guilty by association. Gulp. Luckily, Edmund gets handed over to Sir Nigel, who's on his way to the Crusades. Along with Hubert (the other squire), Rannulf the pagan Crusader, and a few others, they start making their way to the Holy Land. The journey is a learning experience. Edmund has to learn how to ride a horse, swing a sword, and master all of his duties as squire. As they pass through London, France, and Venice, Edmund sees all the maps that he saw as a child unfold into real places. Places that fit his imagination to greater or lesser degrees (London = not his ideal vacation spot). After battling seasickness, hangovers, and a bout of fever, Edmund and his gang land in Acre. Crusaders from all over get ready to take the city as they wait for their king, Richard the Lionheart. After a few skirmishes the king arrives, and shortly thereafter they are able to lay siege to the city. Edmund is a little thrown off by the ways of war. The fighting is one thing, but King Richard's command to slaughter thousands of prisoners is quite another. And Edmund's not the only one who finds it shocking—even Sir Nigel finds it a tough pill to swallow. After Acre, the Crusaders from England break camp and pursue their enemy's army into the south, toward Jerusalem. There's another major battle in Arsuf, where both Nigel and Rannulf are injured. Edmund is left with a choice—join another knight in riding to Jerusalem, or return home with the others. We leave him in this predicament, looking between the shining city of Jerusalem and the dark Crusade ship bound for England.

As we were learning more and more about the middle ages and how people behaved, what their daily routines were and basically how medieval life persisted. We wrote a letter using medieval standards, addressed to anyone of our preference. It would be written in 1195, be signed by your character through a draw (mine was a Lord) and would take place in medieval england. The letter had to show our advanced comprehension of the feudal system, and how the life of your character lived. My letter was written by Sir Bagley III and was addressed to a Serf inhabited on my land. In it’s whole, Sir Bagley III was telling the serf he was being evicted from his land as Sir Bagley III needed more space for his children. After completing the letter, we wrote ANOTHER reflection paragraph depicting our character and what his role was in the letter.

Each week we read a chunk of the book. Then to reflect, we each were assigned a role reflect on the book in a different, meaningful way. The three roles to rotate through were creative connector, artful artist, and smart summarizer. Each role had a form of communicating their ideas through a different perspective. After we read each chunk of the book (split into three) we would meet in our meet n’ chat Monday roles to communicate our ideas through our roles. Creative Connector was all about finding meaningful connections from medieval times, but mainly the book to real, modern day. This role was definitely not easy since medieval times has changed so drastically. Smart Summarizer was a role that was not particularly hard nor easy. It was a role that summarized the whole section of the book into 200 words. Artful Artist was a role that was right for me. The Artful Artist was in charge of depicting a specific scene directly from the book.

Once we had finished reading the book, we got into partners to research and present an example of continuity and an example of change from medieval times to today. The partner I was put with was Nathan. Milestone 4 was all about research. We created a shared document with our partner and chose 5 examples between continuity and change to research just in case one of them didn’t go to plan. The 5 examples that Nathan and I chose were weaponry, food, language, law enforcement and court. The whole basis of this stage was to find out as much information as we can to create a better understanding of medieval times with continuity and change. We also started a keynote to present to the class later in the project. At first our keynote was just a title slide and some bullet points, but as our knowledge of medieval times grew, so did our keynote. The keynote was still raw though which brings us straight into the next stage of the project, peer critique.

Peer critique was a vital piece to the presentation as without any feedback, our keynote would be clumsy and the presentation wouldn’t have gone as well as it did. The final piece to the puzzle was the presentation of our learning. The place where we would display our keynote to the whole class and talk about everything we learned. Our examples of continuity and change and how we thought the project was a meaningful experience to us. Our presentation went well and we even went almost first just so we could get it out of the way. Overall I think this project meant a lot in the learning of different times like how it is even today with global warming and the acceptance of all people and cultures. Overall I’ve learnt so much on how fast our world develops and how fast societies can change and shift into something completely different.