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Daily Archives: March 20, 2017

Lesson – American Empires
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March 20, 2017 by mrcaseyhistory

Quaestio: How do the social, political, and cultural developments of the Aztec and Inca reflect their efforts to adapt to the …
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Category: Unit 3: Great Empires of Asia

There are some approaches to teaching history that simply cannot be accomplished remotely. For everything else, there’s Google Classroom. . . . This portrait was taken on May 8th, 2017, during one of my favorite activities, possibly my number one favorite activity, of the entire year: a full class re-enactment of a day in the life of #KingLouisXIV at the Palace of #Versailles. It requires a lot of set up: having students pre-write content-rich speeches for the king, buying some apple juice or iced tea as a stand in for breakfast broth, plus multiple small bags of chips and some candies (for the monarch’s meals and desserts), I need to remember to bring my purple fleece blanket for the cape, but thankfully I have a beautifully ornate crown made by a student for a previous project, I have to tape to the wall my full size color hand cut and taped laminated paintings of Louis XIV, and of course, I have to dig out my elk antlers and mounting board. When class begins, students work on the Nunc Agenda while I hand out tiny slips with different roles as members of the Versailles royal court and tasks associated with various cues, instructing them not to turn them over yet. Then, I ask one student to step outside, and I give her/him a slip, letting her/him know that they have been chosen to be King Louis and experience a day in his life. It is only at this point that I abruptly and rapidly start explaining the process to the class, making sure each person knows their role and when to act and has their associated props as needed. With everyone still pretty confused, I throw on the baroque music, and pull up the PowerPoint of Versailles images to go with each scene of the re-enactment, alternating with videos I took when I visited in 2014 (some images from that too, others from Google). Then I ask the two bedroom courtiers to go retrieve the king, and then the Rube Goldberg machine begins. The most satisfying part is how, despite the whole routine never being practiced or seen before, it all pretty much comes together live, each student responding to the cues of the one before, and everyone gets the experience or being both performer and audience simultaneously.