Tools For Teachers, Ex. 2

Feast of the Century -- the Sixteenth Century!
(Resources for Using It's Disgusting—and We Ate It! in School Activities)

Subjects: art, social studies, recess
Based on: pages in It's Disgusting titled "A Royal Feast" and "Eat Yourself Sick, Your Highness" (pages 20-21, page numbers not marked)
Purpose: to have fun drawing silly pictures, and to learn the names of famous people in history
Teacher Preparation: hand out pictures of historic people with a few facts and dates about each—giving a different person to each child, trying to match the famous person to the child. A good source for pictures and information about a variety of famous folks (both male and female and of different races) is the series by Kathleen Krull including Lives of the Writers, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Musicians, and Lives of the Presidents.

Instructions to Students: King Henry VIII of England is throwing a feast for some of history's most famous people—and you get to help! King Henry has hired Spark Rantoul, Time Traveler, to go through history picking up famous people in his time-traveling Winnebago. The king is going to serve his favorite food from the year 1520 and chat with them about sports. (1520 is just after the Medieval Period, but close enough to use with pages 20-21.)

This is a group project, where the whole class will draw a giant feast.

Start by drawing a long line on a roll of blank newsprint or other long paper (newspapers often give away the ends of rolls for free). That line will be the feast table's top. Now draw a table bottom and numerous table legs. Now, draw a picture of your famous historic person standing behind the table, messily eating foods from pages 20 and 21 of It's Disgusting! Don't forget to put a name tag on your person!

Maybe if the picture turns out really well, your principal will even let you paint it permanently on the wall of your cafeteria—just like Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting The Last Supper (which he painted on a cafeteria wall around the turn of the century—the sixteenth century, of course)!

As a final treat, you could do a first-person report on the person you drew!

Other related ideas: you could assign several related projects throughout the day using the famous historic figures that you give to the students. Each student could "be" his or her famous person in some of these projects. Each student could, for example, choose a favorite sick food from the historic foods section of It's Disgusting (pages 18-25). In the Colonial period alone (pages 24-25), George Washington, Dolly Madison, Sacajawea, and six others could choose different foods.

More Exercises:

500-Year-Old Food Makes Me Sick!
Recess Makes Me Queasy (a game)
Other Activities