Feudal System Projects

 We finished up a fun project recently. Rugrat has been learning about the feudal system in History. Or as our resident history degree called it -- the "pyramid scheme." 

I found some projects on this site that we decided to do too. I think it really made this chapter of our History book a lot more interesting.

The first thing we did was this fun fun tower.

It is based on a poem called "The Four Alls." It didn't really hit the nobles, except that I mentioned them while we worked on it.

We worked our way down from the top. Starting at the church who "prayed for all."

Then came the king who "ruled all."

Next were the knights who "protected all."

And finally the serfs (or peasants in the poem) who "worked for all."

It was fun and required some creativity coming up with what to use for the various things in the boxes.

I still wasn't sure she understood just how uneven things were though so I used some M&Ms and an illustration from the same site I found the idea for the tower on.

I made this little graphic then we put some little cupcake paper liners down - one for each person represented.

Everyone started with an equal share of the 'profits' so 10 M&Ms each. Then they started making their payments of fidelity: 6 of each serf's to the knight over them, 5 of those per serf from the knight to his noble, 6 per knight from each noble to his king. I just followed the directions for the illustration on her site. 

When we were done distributing, we counted them and wrote the numbers on the graphic sheet I had put together.

The inequality became quite a striking visual with the M&Ms, particularly noticeable when comparing the king's 46 to the serf's 4. Rugrat was thoroughly put out about it, especially since she knew who had done all the work to earn that 'profit' in the first place.

So, I feel pretty satisfied that she got it. And it was a lot of fun too.

Plus, she made sure to share some of the 'profit' with her older brother so he helped us clean it up too. LOL.