May

31

Being a knight

Filed Under Social Studies 

When covering the Middle Ages with my students, I often have them draw up a coat of arms or crest of some kind. They need a suitable decoration (a bird or lion or something) on the front, and a slogan to go with it, preferably in Latin.

I’ve usually had a hard time getting across what it should look like, largely because most Grade 8 kids have never looked closely at a coat of arms and I don’t have a lot of examples to show them.

Says-It.com comes to my rescue with their Official Seal Generator. It’s a cool little site that let’s you take the basic elements of a coat of arms and combine them in different ways to create your own, unique crest. If you need a unique slogan, a link is provided to Wikipedia’s List of Latin Phrases, many of which are perfect for just this kind of activity.

Of course, there’s a lot of possible combinations of animals and slogans on the crest that would be inappropriate, even crude, but that can easily happen without this shield generating tool.

I’m looking forward to trying this with my class.

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