Jocelyn's blog

Sep. 23, 2006

Medieval Madness!

We had a Medieval Day today with our homeschooling group and it was fantastic.

Here was the invitation:

We are holding a special day on Saturday 23 September to celebrate Medieval times.
From 10am to 2pm
We encourage you to come as a family.

What's the rough format?
We want to start at 10am and give children the opportunity to try lots of activities/crafts - some will be compulsory but most will be chosen by your child before the day.

After a general intro, we will have the etiquette class. Then we will divide the children into groups and they will go to one activity "station" and then make their way through all the others they have chosen for the morning.

Activities include:
Weaving
Knight's Pouch
Letter illumination
Piqued hat making
Stained glass
Archery
Trebuchet
Stab the Dummy and
Knight's Challenge (eat some gruel, storm the castle, rescue the lady)

Here's some photos of the events:

Piqued hat making (Abi poses) Stained glass window craft

Letter illumination

Archery Knight's Challenge- storm the castle

Zac with his knight's pouch Time to eat the gruel!!!

At around 12noon, we want to get things set up for a medieval feast.

At around 1pm, we are thinking of having a jousting tournament. All families will gather to take part and spectate and cheer.

Here's a couple of photos from that:

Junior jousting

Without the helmets

In one of the helmets...

Here's some general shots too:

The parents and children who dressed up.

Mark and me

One of the dads is really amazing and makes his own armour, weapons, shields and came up with those brilliant jousting lances which retracted on impact and were nice and safe. The shields at the start were his and here's some more of his handiwork:

• Post A Comment! • Send to a Friend!

Comments

Oct. 3, 2006 - It was wonderful

Posted by DonnaLupton

Jocelyn,

You did a great job! All of the kids were having so much fun on the day. All of your pre-work really paid off. Everything was well run and went smoothly. I hope we can get some pictures soon... perhaps I'll track down Shell today =0)

• Permanent Link

Oct. 4, 2006 - Thanks, Donna

Posted by

As you can see, I got the photos from Shell's gallery. I kept a lot more for myself - she did a good job of getting around to everything!

Edited by JocelynJames on Oct. 4, 2006 at 5:00 AM

• Permanent Link

Oct. 13, 2006 - This is so awesome!!!

Posted by fliztea

Wow, what a fantastic day! I am soooooooo impressed! In fact, combined with the Floriade, I want to move to Canberra!!! Where did you get the ideas for the day?

• Permanent Link

Oct. 18, 2006 - Ideas?

Posted by JocelynJames

Hi Flitztea,

I got the original ideas from two places - the back of Mystery of History Volume 2 plus another book called "Medieval Projects You Can Make and Do".

After that. it was brainstorming with the other ladies and working out who was running what. They all were great and helped SO much. One lady organised all the craft activities and we allocated helpers for her on the day.

We had such a great time and because I booked it six months' in advance, a lot of the dads could come too.

• Permanent Link