The Second Shakespeare Unit (ruffs, Globe Theater, sonnets)

We had an enormous Shakespeare Unit to fill out the school year after we got home from Quebec at Christmastime. It was super fun to revisit our favorite writings and plays. I don't know why I'm bothering to post these unit organization screenshots, because you can't even read the tiny writing, and the links aren't clickable, but I don't know how to put them in a more useful format here. At least this will help me remember a broad overview of things we talked about and did!

Here is a pretty old Pinterest Board from last time we did this (hopefully some of the links still work?):

Shakespeare Unit Pinterest Board

And some assorted pictures from activity days during this unit. Making ruffs (we did this years ago too):

Gus was inspired by his ruff and the "clothing in the Elizabethan Era" videos that we watched, and ended up making a whole elaborate costume for himself.

He looks just as grand as Queen Elizabeth!

Hmm, not sure why this is in this batch of pictures? cute, though :)

Here are the children working on making paper models of the Globe Theater:   https://www.papertoys.com/globe.htm

Goldie's, maybe?

Ziggy's (look at all the people inside!)

Junie's

Talking about Macbeth and making "witch's brew" with dry ice:

Eek, a scary witch!

Some wonderful sonnet-writing practice:

Ziggy's less formal interpretation :)

Teddy's perfectly-scanning sonnet

Inside Ziggy's "life size" globe theater (complete with watching animal audience):

Revolutionary War Clothing

Last time, we made colonial tricorne hats for the boys. It was a cool project, but quite involved, and since we still have the hats I didn't think it was worth doing it again! We just got out our old hats for the little boys to wear. Ziggy (the hat-lover) was SO PLEASED to wear his. He wore it all the time for weeks. Maybe months. 

He was always marching around outside or inside, often singing or holding a musket of some sort. Funny boy.

We also made mob caps during our previous unit, and they were really cute, but I just had to sew them myself because the children were too young to help. They probably could have handled it this time, but we were pressed for time that week and I finally just ended up having us make these simple new-sew versions. They were cute too, though the other ones are more authentic. Here is a link to the simple version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ougzi-6PjY

The girls were really interested in colonial clothing, and we found some cool videos that showed in a lot of detail how the upper classes and the lower classes would have dressed.

Getting dressed: colonial men  

Getting dressed: colonial women 

Getting dressed: servants

Daisy was quite inspired after viewing these videos, and made herself a very authentic colonial outfit, complete with underclothing and long woolen stockings with garters.

For our end-of-unit celebration, we watched our favorite movie about the Constitution ("A More Perfect Union") and the children dressed up as people from the time of the Revolutionary War. Daisy was George Washington (in this portrait).

We had red, white, and blue jello (using this recipe, and making the white layer with unflavored gelatin, sour cream, and whipped cream).

Junie went through several costume iterations. This one was her dressed as the haughty King George III.

And Goldie was the lovely Martha Washington!

Making Egyptian jewelry

There are many, many good ideas out there for making Ancient Egypt-style jewelry! And we tried several of them. I never thought I would voluntarily have my children do an art project involving spray-painted macaroni, for example, but we found these cool-looking snake-y cuffs to make…and then the variant looked so pretty here…that I swallowed my objections! Anything is better with gold spray-paint, it seems. (And we went through a couple cans of it during this unit!)

Here's a page showing how to make Egyptian collars. A variation is here. We used lids to some take-out containers we had, since they were a little flatter than paper plates, but either would work. You can just use anything you have on hand to decorate them (if you balk at macaroni…ha ha) and we have a huge box of these jewel-y sort of things, so that's mostly what we used.

Maybe my favorite thing we made were these circlets with the royal serpent sign. (This same site shows a pretty variation on the armlets/cuffs.) They are just so simple and elegant, I think. The girls could not WAIT to wear them for our Egyptian celebration!

The boys liked wearing theirs too. But real Pharaohs don't smile, of course.

Here is my very favorite collar—the one Sebastian made. It looks geometric and cool, but upon closer examination you can see it is a road- and sign-themed piece of jewelry. Sebastian, as you may remember, really loves roads and road signs, so…naturally…he would make his Ancient Egyptian jewelry reflect this interest. You can see he has included: stop signs and yield signs, flashing "caution" lights, lane lines, bridges, and an impressive array of every type of common traffic light including the "left turn on arrow only" versions.

Oh, Sebastian. How I love that boy.

Making Egyptian Pharaoh Death Masks

This was one of the coolest crafts we have done, I think—I mean, the final result is just so…funny and weird and impressive all at once, don't you think? I got the idea for the masks here. Like the lady at that link, I just ordered paint-your-own masks from Oriental Trading Company (find them here) an the kids spray-painted them gold and then painted with acrylics on top of that.

I had just torn a couple of ligaments in my foot the day before we did this project, and I couldn't even walk or get out of bed at the time, so I literally sat in my bed and helped the younger kids cut the cardboard, and then left everything else up to them. (This picture was taken a few weeks later.) They did an awesome job.

Junie scared the daylights out of me by standing next to my bed in the morning and I woke up with THIS FACE starting down at me. Terrifying but also somehow…awesome? :)

If you don't want to do the masks, you could also do this craft that lets the child's face show through. They are cute too. As shown here,

Clothing History: A Timeline through (my favorite) Movies

It was an interesting exercise for me to put the movies I love into some sort of historical order. I hadn't even really placed many of them in time at all, and seeing which ones overlapped and which were historically more precise was really quite fun! In addition, we don't really watch movies in our family very often (at least the children don't). We generally have family movie night once every couple months, and we started that tradition maybe 5 years ago, so even the older children have probably only seen movies numbering in the dozens. Thus, there are a LOT of my favorite movies I had yet to introduce them to and I knew everyone would feel this was a VERY special unit!

I'm sure lots of these movies aren't costumed with complete historical accuracy, but they were good enough for our purposes. My main objective was to find a movie I LIKED (and that was child-appropriate) for each period, not just one that was accurate. And I suppose there aren't all that many movies I really love. This list covers most of them. There are a few I had to just stick in there because I couldn't think of anything else (Hercules!) but even those are at least movies I think are okay.

For this Clothing Unit, we only picked ONE movie to watch from each time period (marked with a *), but I put down all the movies I thought of in case we do this again someday, or in case someone else wants other ideas. That Victorian Period really has a wealth of great movies, eh? And I hard time thinking of any 80's-era movies I loved. I'm sure there's something I'm forgetting. :)

American Girl Doll Clothing History Timeline

Here is something I made for Daisy. She has a doll—not American Girl brand, but the same size and style—which she loves to dress up, so we looked up all kinds of historical costumes that are available for those dolls (and even bought a few!). There are some amazing doll costumers. You can find very expensive, gorgeous historical reproductions on Etsy and cheaper period-style clothing from China on Ebay. I don't even know if it's worth putting up links because they are always changing, but it's easy to find beautiful things!

Anyway, I made this chart of American Girl dolls wearing clothing styles from the various eras. She loved it. And she's actually quite good, now, at pinpointing which eras various styles come from!

And here is Rosie (her doll) dressed in a few of her costumes:

Marie Antoinette :)

1920s

Junie's doll Violet wearing the Christian Dior "New Look"

Matching (Daisy put her sweater on backwards to make it match) :)