Overview & Review Time - High Middle Ages

Dance of Death - Nuremberg: Google Image search

Death, Halloween and the Middle Ages: a lot of our Halloween ideas come from the Middle Ages - skeletons from the times of plague, a gruesome afterlife for sinners, spirits walking the earth (Celtic traditions carried on in Christianity), witches (Celtic wise women) and of course the day Halloween coming from the phrase All Hallow's Eve (the day before the Christian holy day of All Saints (or All Hallows) when the people who have died are remembered and prayed for. Christians took over this holiday from the Irish Gaelic festival of Samhain.

Homework for the next while:
   Check over Overview handout given today in class (I'll scan and have a link to it in Jupiter grades for students who were absent.) Start work on writing definitions for important terms in your own words, particularly for the phrases you don't know/remember.

Major assignment: One pager biography which will be used for Jeopardy: Medieval Style game.

Choose one famous Medieval person from the following list. You will make a one page computer document that has one cited image of your person and five important facts about that person. These facts and images will be used to create a Jeopardy game we will play during the week of Nov. 5-9. Spelling & citations will be very important. Due date: November 2 (Friday morning, first class!)

Monday and Friday of next week, please remember to bring a donation for the Food bank! We want to beat the grade 12's in this cross grade challenge!! I'll provide a snack style breakfast both days. Yogurt, granola bars, hot chocolate - no bacon or quiches :)
Report cards will be coming out at the end of November, so we are in the final stretch of Term 1. Please make sure that you are all caught up on assignments and can demonstrate skills and understanding of over-arching questions.

We're starting to really dig into life in the middle and late middle ages. By now, you have read at least 5-10 pages of the book you signed out. (I hope you remembered to bring it home.) and you are going to be reading a fair amount and completing questions and creating a comparison organizer to look at the three types of medieval courts. (page 59 #1 in the yellow box). I promised you a video tutorial on how to create a chart using a text document program. I've used Open Office in the video, but you can use Word, if that's what you have at home. If you've got a new version of Word that saves documents as a ".docx", please do a "Save As" and save it as an older version of Word, so the file extension will be ".doc" instead. Our system here doesn't seem to like "docx" and I have a lot of trouble opening them in Open Office.
*Parents - our school system uses open source software because it's free. Open Office is free to download and is as good an Office suite type program as Microsoft's product. Please consider downloading it, as your teen will be using it at school for the next few years.

Here's the video tutorial. It's a .swf (Flash) format, so please make sure you have Shockwave Flash on your computer, so you can watch it.

Make a chart tutorial ss8

Homework:  #4 & #7 on p. 54 (started in class & demonstration given)

                     Read pages 54-56 & complete #1 in Activities on p. 56

                     Read pages 56-59. Complete #1 (Comparison Organizer) & #3 & #5 Activities p.59

Have a great weekend!

Term two has begun and we are starting Unit 2. Today, everyone was assigned the title page and all that needs to be done is block lettering for "High Middle Ages" and a 2.5 cm border around the page (letters and border coloured, please).  We'll add in images as we go through the unit.

http://wikimedia/Edward_der_Bekenner.jpg

Tomorrow, we will be acting out scenes from the Bayeux Tapestry which, as a primary source, chronicled the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and saw William the Conqueror take the throne of England. This covers two of the prescribed learning outcomes in Social Studies 8:

•     interpret and evaluate a variety of primary and secondary sources
• plan, revise and deliver an oral presentation

Things we're looking forward to:

•    building a trebuchet?  (We need parent help for this one!!!)
•    Medieval fair at end of Term 2. Costumes, food, games in celebration of all we've learned!