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Living History
Living History
Spring 2022, Gary & Jerri-Ann Jacobs High Tech High
Students immersed themselves in the history of early civilizations, the classical ages, and the middle ages, exploring the time periods through the mediums of time, communication, construction, and sustenance to answer the essential question:
What did history look and feel like for the people living in it?
To learn about each time period, they lived through the daily lives and essential tools of various time periods through activities such as camping, building fires, creating clay tablets, binding books to contain their knowledge, and building pens and catapults to understand the lives of individuals over the course of time.
To integrate the math, physics, and humanities of the various time periods into a final product, students lived history by crafting and performing a play that enacted scenes from the different classical civilizations and the topics we discussed this semester.
Clay Tablets
One of the first products of the semester had to do with ancient forms of writing. While studying Mesopotamia and Egypt, students analyzed their different forms of writing in cuneiform and hieroglyphs.
They then made their own word sound "alphabets" in the style of cuneiform and hieroglyphs and transliterated words of wisdom that meant something to them.
In pairs, they carved their words of wisdom in cuneiform in the top portion of their version of The Rosetta Stone, and in English at the bottom. After transliterating the message into hieroglyphs, students painted their words of wisdom in the middle.
To contextualize their message, students wrote two pieces of writing that told readers what their words of wisdom meant to them, and what ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians might have thought!
Handmade booklets
The bulk of this project in humanities was a deep-dive into a number of different ancient civilizations: China, Greece, India, or Mesoamerica.
After choosing their civilizations, students worked in groups to explore the philosophies or ways of thinking, the architecture, and the art of the civilization. While thinking about how history was recorded and what information was deemed "important" enough to pass on, students held onto their work to put together.
As a way to record their learning throughout the semester, students put their work into a template and hand-stitched the signatures (bundles of folded paper). To hold their work together, students then bound their books in a burlap or linen cover.
Exhibition Play
At the end of the semester, students spent a significant amount of time producing an entire play that synthesized their learning from the semester.
To start, students analyzed the elements of a screenplay to see what it takes to construct a script. Then, in groups, students came up with vision boards of potential stories that would later be voted on to become our script. The vision board below was what was voted on in the end, and came to fruition at exhibition!
To prepare for exhibition night, students were assigned roles: scriptwriters, costume designers, lighting, music, backdrop creation, stage hands, pamphlet creators, actors, and so many others!
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