Stained Glass craft

I had one final King Arthur activity up my sleeve, for this bit of funschooling homeschool history and that was a stained glass craft.  I know, everyone has a stained glass activity, and you’re right, but my kids haven’t done a stained glass craft before, and it’s fun. Now, this can fit into several different history lessons. For us, it was part of a Middle Ages Unit, and particularly a King Arthur Unit and learning about knights, but it could also be part of a Historical Trades Unit (note to self, make a landing page for that since I have pretty much ALL of them written up now).

Edited to add: Sigh and double sigh, I apparently have forgotten how to read a calendar and did not schedule this for Monday…  I added in the primary picture, and ‘ll add in the rest after church.

 

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Our Stained Glass Craft inspiration: Arthur and the Sword

If you look at the illustrations for this book, it’s fairly obvious why I chose to do a stained glass activity; it practically screams at you, “Make a stained glass window.”  And since I’d been wanting to do this stained glass activity since our Middle Ages unit back during the Mystery of History 2, it was going to happen.

The book tells the classic tale of how King Arthur got his famous sword, Excalibur.  Though there are actually two versions of the tale.  The first is the Lady of the Lake giving the sword to Arthur; that one seems to be currently in disfavor.  The other is the currently more frequently told tale of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone.

When we were at Disney World last year, Princess and I gave it a go at pulling the sword from the stone and were singularly unsuccessful.

 

Stained Glass Craft

First, I had the kids grab as many broken crayons as they could.  Then, when I wasn’t sure that would prove to be enough, because I’d recently culled all broken crayons from the pile, I had them also use the worn-down crayons.  At first, I had them sharpening them into little bitty pieces and using that to get our crayon shavings, but then the kids thought that was too slow.

So I showed them how they could smash the crayons with hammers, and the kids were all generally much happier with the activity then.  After a sufficiently large number of crayons had been quite thoroughly smashed and broken into pieces, I gave them the assignment.

Based on all of the King Arthur books they’d read, and this book in particular, they were to make a design you would find in the books.

First, we painted out our design idea using black paint onto wax paper to represent the leading.

Once the paint had dried, we carefully sprinkled the appropriate colors in the lines.  Wel,l sort of.  When you break the crayons with a hammer, you get rather big pieces, and the kids were pouring like half an inch of crayon shavings onto their waxed paper.

Finally, I pulled down my iron, and a towel folded over several times (I did not need a repeat ironing mistake, PS: You can’t use an iron on carpet.  It will melt the carpet, and potentially leave nasty black gunk on your iron), and set to ironing the kids’ creations.

Which, as I suspected, very quickly had crayon shavings running everywhere.  But the boys didn’t mind in the least; they decided it made their wizards look much cooler.  Princess, on the other hand, looked at what happened to her brother’s stained glass crafts and promptly took off most of her crayon shavings.  I guess that’s an advantage of being the last one to go.

All in all, I think it turned out rather well, if not super like it was in my imagination.

Some more fun history lessons for you

• Michelangelo art history lesson
• The Discovery of Iceland
• Ideal School Day
• How does ocean temperature affect a ship’s movement?
• Colonial America Games