Browse our Categories! Arms and Armor Celtic Lore Historical Fiction Historical Non-Fiction (A-H) Historical Non-Fiction (I-R) Historical Non-Fiction (S-Z) King Arthur Legends Miscellaneous Fiction Miscellaneous Non-Fiction

Miscellaneous Hands on History: Middle Ages by Susan Kapuscinsi Gaylord $12.95 / Scholastic Books / 2002 For over ten years, Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord taught bookmaking. She now has used that experience to create Hands-On History: Middle Ages, a collection of simple projects to help students understand more about medieval life by doing, not just by reading. However, purists may gnash their teeth over the fact that many of these projects use modern materials. Gaylord admits that she is not concerned with using authentic products. Rather, she works with contemporary materials to make equivalent products. Her instructions for a "Middle Ages Feast" are a good example. To give students the experience of eating with their hands, she recommends serving chicken wings along with store-bought meat and vegetable turnovers and pies. Instead of baking trenchers, she suggests using pita bread sliced in half. For those children allergic to nuts, she provides a recipe for a marzipan substitute made with potatoes instead of almonds. (She also provides a recipe for pottage, the commoner's fare, which is quite accurate if you skip the recommended boullion cube). In other projects, she teaches students how to create their own gameboard for Nine Man's Morris. She also describes a few basic embroidery stitches and provides directions for creating a purse which can be worn by boys and girls alike. Her cardboard loom teaches students terms such as warp, weft, and tabby, and her instructions for creating a craftsman's sign help to show how people communicated in an essentially illiterate society. She also provides useful patterns for creating illuminated letters and borders, heraldic designs, and "stained glass" windows, using posterboard and tissue paper. (Scholastic helpfully produced this book with perforated pages, which makes for easy photocopying; they even grant teachers the right to copy patterns for classroom use.) Gaylord provides helpful information alongside each of these projects. Her chapter on heraldry introduces the concepts of feudalism and serfdom, alongside ordinaires and subordinaires. Her cardboard castle teaches students the difference between a keep and a gatehouse, and reminds them that in the Middle Ages, lice, bedbugs, and rats were more common than dragons and unicorns. "What They Ate" includes excerpts from 15th-century etiquette guides while "How They Worked" explains the responsibilities of bailiffs and reeves. However, her education comes with a liberal coating of entertainment. If you want to teach children about life in the Middle Ages, this book will provide plenty of solid introductory material. Even if you do not use these specific projects, Hands-On History provides a good example of how to create activities which both teach and entertain. —Kevin Filan

Click here to order:Hands on History: Middle Ages             To order Renaissance Magazine, click here. To order medieval tapestries and other period products, click here.