Nicole Alderman

I stumbled across this video showing the medieval way to make casein glue with milk, vinegar, and ash!

(Turn on closed captions for instructions)



The description of the video also has information:

Cheese glue, made of curds and lye, was chosen to join the pieces together due to its water-resistance and durability. Fresh spring milk was curdled with apple cider vinegar. The curds were separated, squeezed and rinsed to remove as much acidity from the vinegar as possible, before being laid out to dry. Wood ash was boiled in water, then strained, to extract the lye. The dried curds were mixed with the lye until they dissolved and the mixture was smooth.

I just added another worksheet--this one is for "designing your own Excalibur." Once side has primary source images of 5 different early-medieval swords. The second page has a section for designing your own sword.

For those wanting a quick video to show kids about the historicity (or lack thereof) on King Arthur, here's a good little video:

Gotta give credit where credit is due, so here's the video by Bernadette Banner drawing the picture I turned into my coloring page:



And, here's The Welsh Viking's video on Arthur:

First off: If anyone has ideas for hands-on, living history activities for studying early medieval Brittonic/Welsh people, I'd love to hear them!

This year I'll be teaching Medieval History, which I'm super excited about. I'm having way too much time learning and prepping for it.

Because I want my kids to learn about primary sources, I made a worksheet with the four earliest mentions of Arthur (yes, the King Arthur of legend) and I made a coloring sheet based off of the art made by Bernadette Banner and The Welsh Viking.

On the worksheet, I made a coloring picture of this 6th century Roman Spatha sword. It's Merovingian/French, but it was really hard finding swords from this time period, and this one was so pretty!



The upper pommel of the sword was hard to figure out the details of, so I used some pommel images from this webpage about Migration Era swords.

It's gone now!

If we delete that post, the whole thread will be deleted, too. Did you already get the contact info you needed from the thread?

I'll delete it at the end of the day if there's no reply by then!

(For those curious, we don't delete posts on request...unless they are in the Singles forum, which this one is.)

Seeing this thread bumped up reminded me of my oil paint experience a few months ago. I had my history students (aged 5-12) paint with oil paint. We only used linseed oil to thin (this did cause some yellowing). But, one thing I hadn't really expected (and should have) was how much paint the kids would get on their hands.

The first class I did this with, I wasn't sure how to get the oil paint. The normal "get hands wet and add soap and wash in the sink was not working." Then a parent suggested using dish soap. Magic!

What we learned to do was to put some strong dish soap with a little water on the kids hand. They were then told to make as many bubble as possible. You need a strong, thick lather! It's the soap that is going to release that oil.

Then, after a lot of soapy bubbles and thick lather have formed, the kids then wash in warm water. This really did a great job of getting the oil paint off!

Of course, this story doesn't help with the process of painting, but it does with the clean up of brushes. Use dish soap (or a soap bar) and really lather than thing with soap. Rinse and repeat until the oil paint is off. It can come off without solvents--you just need soap as a surfactant.

Nicole Alderman (on  Aug 20, 2018) wrote:The smoke from the fires in BC has come down to us. Air quality is at 155. My neighbors are in an RV as their house is being built, and their daughter is really struggling to breath. I can't find anything about clean air shelters.

We spent yesterday going from store to store and enjoying their air conditioned/filtered air. Can't cool the house down today, because it would bring all the smoke inside. We've been using our garage as an airlock. We enter the house through the person-sized garage door, and then enter the house from the garage. We've got the air running through the air filter through our central air (our heater allows us to push air through it), but I don't think it's clearing the air much. My throat is getting tighter and tighter. I think I'll probably go and turn it off, since it might be drawing air from outside, and even filtered, it's worse than the air inside.

It's weird to think that, 8 years ago was the first time we ever really had smoke. How little did I know how much worse things would get, and how this would become "the new normal". The air quality today got up to 230. In previous years, we spent weeks over 250.

When I was a kid, we never had "smoke season." My grandmother--who's over 90--had never had smoky air until that first time 8 years ago.

Since then, we've had some smoke almost every year. My son said yesterday, when the smoke started blowing in, "Smoke season is early this year! The termites haven't even emerged" (every year, the termites emerge from the ground and fly around in a big swarm of termites. It's usually late-August, early September). My son is 12. He's had smoke in the summer for 3/4ths of his life, and almost all of his memory. My daughter is 9. Only one year of her life didn't have smoke in the summer/fall.

Anyway, we're all hiding inside now from the smoke. We've got a box fan filter going as well as a Honeywell air filter my husband saved from the dumpster at work.