Cedar City Shakespeare Festival

Daisy and Juliet

Our final activity for this unit was a trip down to Cedar City to see a Shakespeare play! I was so happy that their Fall season wasn't quite over, and even happier that they had a school-group discount to some matinee performances! We even got to have a backstage tour. My sister-in-law, who lives in Cedar City, kindly agreed to watch the littlest girls for us, so we got to make a whole day of it and Sam even got to come! We saw "Twelfth Night" and loved it. Although we had read it and studied it and even watched movies of it, it's always so great to get to see an actual play come to life! There is nothing like live theater. It was a great experience.

While we waited for the play to start, we wandered around the campus and looked at the sort of "Globe-ish" outdoor theater---it's not really a replica, but it looks kind of like The Globe on the outside, and is arranged similarly. The children liked seeing it, anyway.

They also, of course, enjoyed walking around on the outdoor stage soliloquizing. During the summer months the Shakespeare Festival has Renaissance-style entertainment out in this area—musicians, jugglers, etc. Sometime we'll have to come back and see some of that.

Newspaper swords

If one is going to sword fight properly, one needs a proper sword—not just a yardstick! I was really happy to find this tutorial for how to make the easiest newspaper swords ever! We didn't even paint ours. We just drew with markers on the hilts. And the children loved them! They're easy enough to make that when they (inevitably) get whacked to death, you can make new ones without too much trouble.

Junie is none-too-sure about this dueling business. But she did insist on having her own sword!

Have at thee, villain!

Sword Fighting and Stage Combat

There's a ton to learn about Stage Combat, and, not being a Theater Person, I knew nothing about any of it, but we watched some interesting videos and read about how actors train and choreograph their fight scenes. The children really liked the idea of staged fights that looked real, and they were fascinated when I told them about fake blood and other special effects actors use. After we learned about it, I gave them yardsticks and told them to choreograph some swordfight scenes. And did they ever! It was pretty hilarious to watch what they came up with.

Abe also tried his hand at juggling. With little success. :) It's hard!

Malachi and Daisy trade insults. Honor demands they fight a duel!

Daisy falls dramatically, wounded.

And dies. What a sad, sad end!

Globe Theater paper models

We like making paper models, so we were happy to find this printable model of the Globe Theater! Here is the link: http://www.papertoys.com/globe.htm

First we printed them out on single sheets, as they are shown in the .pdf. At that tiny size, they were quite hard to make! The cutting of the little tabs was way too hard for Daisy and Malachi, so I had to do all of that, and it wore out my scissor-hand too! As we were finishing the models, it occurred to me that we could have made the printout bigger. So, I put the picture into photoshop, divided it into four quadrants, and printed out each quadrant on a separate piece of paper (thus increasing the scale of the theater by four). It wasn't a perfect solution, as there was some cropping on the edge of the pages, but we were able to overlap and draw in the missing parts, and it worked out fine. And making that big size was MUCH easier! Sebby made the big theater, and it turned out great, and was much less tiring to cut and fold. We also find that using tape causes much less frustration than using glue on this type of model, though of course it doesn't look as neat. But we don't mind.

It's really a cool model. Very detailed. The children loved putting their tiny animals inside the theater and pretending to put on plays.

Renaissance Fair

Abe in Chain Mail

Our friends told us about a Renaissance Fair happening nearby, which just happened to fall right during our Shakespeare Unit! How lucky for us. It was a gorgeous (HOT!) day and we had such a fun time wandering around and enjoying Renaissance-y things (although, I must say, much of the stuff we saw there seemed more Medieval than Renaissance-themed–maybe the lines between the two are more blurred than I thought?). Also, I refuse to call it a "Renaissance Faire."

A couple weeks before we went to the Renaissance Fair, we watched some maypole dances on YouTube. Daisy was really fascinated with them, especially this video of little girls dancing the maypole in their school uniforms. After watching that video, she could not WAIT to go see the maypole dance, and she vowed to wear her tan jumper so she could be just like the little girls in the video! She thought about it all through the ensuing weeks, and when she woke up the morning of the Renaissance Fair she reminded me immediately: "Remember, I'm wearing my brown jumper today!" She was SO happy when we got there and she saw the big maypole…

and even MORE thrilled when she got to do the maypole dance herself! (I was happy they had a little maypole they were allowing people to dance around, since I wasn't sure they'd be letting just anyone do it, and I knew Daisy would be really sad if she didn't get to!)

More maypole-ing (you can see Daisy watching in the foreground to our right)

The birds of prey show was cool. I love owls.

We looked around at a few of the booths, but I was too afraid someone would break something to really want to browse around much.

Jousting Show. My friend said she was underwhelmed by the jousting, but I thought it was awesome. Probably my favorite thing we saw. I've never seen real jousting at all before, so I guess I was just impressed they were really doing it! Their lances broke every time, but no one got knocked off his horse. I loved the thundering horses' hooves and the flags flying in the breeze. It was so hot, but that breeze made it bearable.

My poor, sad children in the stocks. (Looks like Junie didn't get the memo about being sad.) I think they are trying to re-create this picture I showed them:

of me in the stocks while visiting Stratford-upon-Avon in England. So sad.

Darling Emeline. Such a sly smile. She looks like a little fox here, with her red hair.

Adorable Harriet in her Scottish garb, and sweet Junie. I'm not quite sure why there was face painting going on here? But, the little girls loved it.

Queen Elizabeth with the girls

Junie was SO proud of herself when she got to dance around the maypole. She couldn't stop beaming.

Malachi did the maypole with help from this lovely girl. I think he was quite taken with her, as he kept mentioning how pretty and how nice she had been with her "beautiful dress." I love his shy little smile in this picture.

Malachi must have done this sword-fighting game 30 times. He loved it so much.

There were such cute little ponies giving rides! They cost money, so we didn't ride, but we loved the little ponies.

Junie got to pet one of them! So cute!

Proportion Drawings

I asked Sam to give us a lesson on proportion, and how artists' understanding of it changed during the Renaissance. As usual, he gave an awesome lesson. One really interesting thing he showed us was this video comparing different styles of female figures in Western Art over 500 years. Fascinating to see how proportions and styles change over time!

Then Sam had the children draw, using our little bendy guy from IKEA. It was cool to see how much better their drawings got as they worked on using relationships (forearm:upper arm, torso:leg, etc.) to draw the figure.

The children also, for some reason, really really liked the part of the lesson where we had people stand up on the table and then measured to see how many "heads" tall they were. They wanted to do it again and again.

Daisy's drawing

Abe's drawing

I really like how Junie's drawing turned out. She worked really hard on it.

Ky's drawing

Seb's drawing (he added in shading as well). He spent a ton of time asking Sam, and erasing, and trying again, to get this right. The angle of the arms as they faced away from him was really tricky to draw, but I think he did a great job with it.

Renaissance Ruffs and Shakespeare Masks

We got the idea of making ruffs from this site. (There are a bunch of other fun ideas on there too.) Once we put on the ruffs, they were so itchy and uncomfortable that everyone immediately wanted them off again. "That's probably just how Queen Elizabeth felt!" I said, and from then on whenever we looked at pictures of Renaissance people wearing ruffs, the children all tsk-ed and made sympathetic noises. Bringing the past to life, that's what we're doing here! :)

Ruffs are easy to make. You just get a really long strip of paper, fold it accordian-style, and punch holes through it so you can thread a string through the holes. We really should have made ours longer/more full. But they sufficed.

We also printed out these funny little Shakespeare masks. The pdf is here.

Daisy made a tiny one, of course. (Junie is the one holding it in the picture, though.)