History Happenings --Exploration, Colonization and the Baroque Period

History is going along well....having fun learning with friends and creating some fun projects.

While learning about history--one story at a time--it's hard to remember that many of these stories are really happening at the same time, just in different locations.  As we've been focusing mostly on the explorations and colonization of the American Continent we took some time to see what was happening back in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

One day we made 'trenchers', bread that is used as a plate.    They ingeniously used the bottom of a glass mason jar as a mold (I'm positive it's not an authentic way of forming the trenchers, but clever nonetheless.)
Mmmmm, potato and corn chowder in trenchers. History can really be delicious!

 We learned about the Baroque Era, from the 1600's to the 1750's, was a time of flowery emotional art and music, and architecture . The creative artist of this period filled their works with fancy little swirls and curlicues, extremely ornate pieces.

While  listening to the Hallelujah chorus of Handel's Messiah and other artists' compositions while we tried to replicate the style of painting that Rembrandt was famous for.   He made pictures of himself and family members.  Those of himself were done in front of a mirror.  He enjoyed making faces at himself and drawing his wild expression, such as shocked, fearful, angry or happy.  He was also fond of using strong lighting to add interest to a face.  he would show half of a person's face with bright sunlight falling on it, and the other half in deep shadow.

We had the kids pair up in a darkened room where we created shadows by using two lamps.  The drew each others face.  Some of them chose to draw themselves using a mirror as Rembrandt did.

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn was born in Holland in 1606.  There are only a few people in history that are so famous that they're known by their first name and Rembrandt is one of them.

Other famous artist of the time are Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known as  El Greco and Peter Paul Rubens.

Baroque music was considered to be quite wild and highly emotional at the time, with many florid melodies going up and down, and all over the place.  Think of Handel's Messiah's Hallelujah chorus with the bass, tenor, alto and soprano often singing on their own and coming together some of the times.  The notable musician of this time period are:  Antonio Vivaldi,  George Frederic Handel, and Johann Sebastian Bach, (noted as among the handful of greatest musicians to ever live).

 

Exploring measurements with a bucket of beans turned out to be quite the fun thing to do for the little guys..[oops, don't tell Liam I called him a little guy, he'll adamantly object!], to do!!

Whether or not he's little, they did have fun making hypothesis' about how many of a  small cup of beans it will take to fill a larger cup....and then do it to see if they were right.

Here is the timeline that was created to show the many "movies" or stories that are going on at the same time in history.