Provide hands-on activities for practice and mastery. Check for understanding of concepts and skills by using relevant standard materials, i.e. worksheets, text problems, workbooks, teacher prepared exercises, etc.
Practice from Text, Collages
Objective: For the students to reinforce the material in step 4 through questions, quizzes, maps, etc.
Activity: Assign the questions from the chapters on the Middle Ages in your textbook. I would recommend that each student be required to create a concept map based on the concept of transformation. If this is kept up to date with each reading, remembering the material will be much easier.
This is a good time to have them use current magazines to produce a collage of medieval society. The collage should include the major social classes (political, religious, economic) and show the relationship of each to the other. This can be a group project if you assign students the task of cutting out representational pictures as homework.
Each student will be assigned a person from the Middle Ages to research. The goal of this research will be to determine how each character helped transform a part of medieval society. Some people to use would be Pope Gregory I, Charlmagne, Pope Gregory VII, Pope Innocent III, Pope Boniface VII, King Henry II of Eng., King John I of Eng., King Philip II and Philip IV of France, Emperor Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire, St. Benedict, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Bernard of Clarivaux, St. Tomas Aquinas. Be sure that students know that the 8.5x11 poster they created must demonstrate how their person transformed society or thinking. I take 2-3 days for this project. Day 1 is spent in the library, day 2 library and classroom research, day 3 presentations.
Students must complete a series of maps showing the transforming face of Europe from the time of Charlemagne through the end of the 15th century. Have them note the development of national boundaries in Eng. and France. Also be sure they see the fragmentation existing in Italy and the Holy Roman Empire.
