Regency Unit, and writing a Regency letter

It is terribly sad, but Daisy is graduating from our homeschool and going to college in the Fall! I feel it more keenly than with the older boys, because by this age the boys had mostly disengaged already, either going to public school or doing outside classes and hardly ever joining our family school. But Daisy has valiantly participated to the very end, doing the activities with us and even sitting through our read-aloud books whenever she is able. It is wonderful to have her with us. She brings the kind of enthusiasm that makes me a better teacher. So, I will be VERY SAD to have her go (and she says she will still join us when she can—but I know it won't be often now), and in her honor I let her choose anything she wanted to study for our last unit with her.

She chose, wonderfully, to study The Regency Era. What a great unit! I was very excited about it. For our purposes we chose to study the longer time period (many people classify the whole period from 1795-1837 as Regency-era, even though the Prince Regent was only officially in power in England from 1811-1820). It encompasses so much great stuff. The French Revolution! The early American Republic! Beethoven and Napoleon! And of course, Jane Austen.

For Public Relations purposes, I called this unit "The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars" when talking to the little boys. And "The Regency Era" when talking to the girls. Thus, everyone was happy.

We learned about lots of people and events as part of this unit, and then we also took as our inspiration some of the expected accomplishments of a well-bred young lady of the era. One day we made quill pens and learned how to write with pen and ink. The older kids also practiced some types of penmanship of the time period, notably "copperplate" (roundhand) and Italian hand. I got each of the girls an inexpensive fountain pen to use. I love fountain pens!

Here are some relevant links:

https://herreputationforaccomplishment.wordpress.com/2015/05/06/anatomy-of-a-regency-letter/ Writing a letter, how to fold a letter

https://herreputationforaccomplishment.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/minums-for-handwriting-practice/ handwriting

https://books.google.com/books?id=GAVQAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false handwriting practice and samples

https://herreputationforaccomplishment.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/rules-for-writing-long-and-short-s-in-jane-austens-era/ the Long S

We already had sealing wax (from our American Revolution unit, maybe?) and were happy to have an excuse to get it out again. Malachi uses sealing wax as a matter of course on all his correspondance, actually, so it was readily at hand.

(Clementine had been going around doing all her sisters' hair throughout this activity, and eventually we took a picture of them all coiffed by her handiwork):

Daisy's writing

Junie's writing

Goldie's lovely (left-handed!) writing

Clementine drew some gnomes and a Caw with the fountain pen. Not bad!

This was Ziggy writing in some other language, I believe

Japanese calligraphy

Once our handmade paper was dry and ready to use, we got out ink and brushes and tried to write on it. I don't know if that can be called true "calligraphy." We don't know at all what we're doing, obviously, but some of our books showed us the proper order of strokes to write kanji characters, and we looked others up online. There are sites like this that will show you a character with an animation to show the stroke order.

Mostly, though, we just wanted to get a feel for the technique of using a brush to write with, and see if we could get characters to look good on our handmade paper.

Japanese is a really hard language to learn, we read, because of the three alphabets and the huge number of kanji in use, but we all learned to count to 10, and we liked this site that explained how some kanji characters came to be. We also watched this Begin Japanology episode about one of the alphabets, hiragana. Really interesting. (I thought this article about gendered speech was interesting too.)

I thought writing the numbers was quite fun. They are much simpler than some of the other characters! :) And I love the thick-thin strokes you get when you're using a brush.

Quill Pens and Berry Ink

During the Civil War, quill pens were still a common writing instrument. Metal nibs were used sometimes too, but quills were cheap and convenient, and ink was often made out of berries. So we decided to try our hands and making and writing with quill pens.

First we made our ink. I had a few strawberries that had gone bad which I saved just for this purpose (I suppose I would have used good berries if we'd had to, but it would have been sad to waste them). We just followed the recipe here: crush some berries and strain the juice into a bowl, then add a bit of vinegar (to set the dye) and salt (so it won't spoil if you keep it around for awhile).

Nice and squishy

Berry ink!

There are a lot of ways to cut quills, some more complicated than others. You can heat up some sand and stick your feather in it to harden the end, which apparently achieves good results, but we didn't bother with that step. Therefore, when we tried to cut our quills like this, they just sort of chipped off or got crushed. But the simple method, of just cutting the shaft of the feather off at an angle, worked just fine for our purposes.

Before we used our pens, we talked about how important handwriting was in those days, and how people would sometimes hire scribes to write their letters for them. We talked about how the mail system changed during the war, and the prevalance of letters for disseminating information. We also looked at lots of handwriting samples. I just love the fancy script the best calligraphers used!

Here is a handwritten letter from a Civil War Soldier

Here is some lovely fancy penmanship (the flourishes are my favorite)

Here is one alphabet (I tried to copy this font style with my quill)

Even Junie and Daisy really loved sitting down with a quill, dipping it in a little "inkwell," and drawing with it. Here are some things we wrote and drew with our quill pens and berry ink:

Ha, I always want to sign letters like this