The View From Kalamazoo

So I suppose I should mention the gig I did in Emma’s class in more detail.

A little history: I’m not the PTA mom type. I am, howrver, a geek…specifically a geek who has had experience working with little kids as the art anchor at day camps, so it’s not hard for me to translate that into my field of medieval studies. Get the little buggers interested in history before someone tells them it’s boring, that’s what I say.

Last year I went in to her kindergarten class and read a great book I have, The Glassmakers of Gurven, a medieval-ly set book about three glassmakers (each specializing in a different color of glass) who have to cooperate to make a beautiful window for the new cathedral of the town. (It’s a gorgeous book…but out of print and extremely hard to find, so if you see it at a yard sale or a used bookstore – snatch it up!) I used transparency film the teacher sent home with Em to make them a little project. By hand I duplicated the shape of the window in the book on the three sheets (set together like overlapping pie pieces), split the kids into three groups (red, yellow, and blue. like the colors in the book) and they colored their part of the design – when put together the three made one round window and a color wheel at the same time. 🙂 It was very pretty taped on to their classroom window. They made knight masks and ‘galloped’ through the hallways – a whole day of medieval fun was had by all.

So this year I thought illuminated letters would be fun. I brought each child a page I’d put together with an illuminated initial for their first name on story paper so they could write a sentence out that included their name (‘Emma learned how books were made,’ each using the individual child’s own name, of course) and lots of copies of knights, ladies, and other things from the Coloring Book of the Middle Ages. I told them all about how books were made in the middle ages (a description of vellum got a great round of “EEEWWWW!”), brought in a manuscript page I have to show them what they really looked like, and they were suitably impressed that every book was written out by hand, since they are just getting going on writing and still find it very cumbersome. I had made a cover for the book (titled ‘Our Medieval Book’ and this will be important), all pages had holed stamped out so the book could be sewn together with yarn…a tidy little project for a class book. Not as cool as a color wheel, but what can I say.

So when we got the ‘This Week In…’ letter home the following week there was a little thank you to Emma’s mom for ‘showing us how books were made in mid-evil times.’ *twitch*

I figure future installments of ‘Emma’s Mom is a Geek’ include heraldry (I can give them examples and they can create their own crests or knight’s shields), building balsawood trebuchets and having contests on who can shoot the ping-pong ball farthest, and in 5th or 6th grade I’ll try to work out a deal with the art teacher, get donations of tile and do a big Byzantine mosaic project. 🙂

crossposted in My lj]