What can you learn at the Renaissance Festival?

What would a year in our family be without Rennaissance Festival pictures?  And the cool stuff we learned there? It’s a sneaky way to get some homeschool history leson in, and see some cool sword fights.

And the kids as always were super excited to sleep in a hotel.  I’m not quite sure why that’s so exciting.

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Of course it’s not all learning at the Renaissance Festival

 

Or course, there’s the non-historical just fun stuff like carousel rides.  I don’t know what the boys did while we rode, but Princess in her absolute favorite Sleeping Beauty dress and I had a blast on the carousel.  Or she did, I had to stand, because she said she needed me next to her.

 

Oh well.

So, what can you learn at the Renaissance Festival?

We learned about pan pipes and how they make music (which is also a science lesson), and how people used to use those for their music.

I came so close to buying one for them….  Thankfully I realized they probably wouldn’t use it much, and besides I can probably have them make one with straws…

There was much discussion about knights and how they dressed and what their armor was.  Of course later on we had a more official history lesson on jousting, and one on armor and small arms combat, and of course we made a knight’s shield.

 

Superman hunted all over and finally found a store that had cuddly toys.  He got to stuff a dragon at a store very like Build-a-Bear.  In the following years since then he has gone back and made a troll, his sister has made a Red Raccoon, and we’ve done a few more characters.

Princess got a gryphon pet, or a bird.  It really depends on how she’s feeling for what she calls it.  She was so excited by it and thought it was the cooolest thing until Superman got a cuddly pet, then she wasn’t so excited by it.  But, it’s okay Mommy has a gryphon pet too, and she likes that her gryphon pet is my gryphon’s baby.

Batman chose an ax as his item this year.  Yes, we let him get it because we really needed more trips to the ER.  We had a very long talk about how and when to use it.  And so far he’s obeyed the rules.  It was fun to watch him madly swinging and fighting the invisible foes.  Especially amusing as we listened to “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”* on the way down, and had just heard the chapter with the dufflepods and their being invisible.

 

My favorite part of the year was getting to see a demonstration of spinning, weaving, and carding.  It was fascinating, to me, not so much to everyone else.  But Jeff nicely herded them away and showed them something dangerous, like the smithy.  Or, maybe he just distracted them and kept Batman from hitting anyone with his ax.

 

All in all, it was a fun day of learning and game playing, and dressing up.  I personally found it amusing that Superman decided to wear his trooper shirt and say he was a knight, Batman wore his cowboy vest, knight shirt, and Santa hat and declared himself a pirate.

Oh and walking in a skirt designed for a hoop skirt without one is a little tricky.  I forgot my hoop skirt, and that was a slight problem by the end of the day………..