P52 - Week 1

I actually have quite a few photos to choose from this week to kick start my P52, but in the end, I decided to focus on the fun research project my boy brought home from school this week.

The assignment is to research a famous person from the Renaissance. The kids have to do a little reading, write up a monologue to memorize, and eventually, they will have to dress up and deliver their speech as part of the 3rd Grade Museum. FUN!

I was not at all surprised when my boy chose Leonardo da Vinci to study. He's had a fascination with the inventor, artist, great thinker for more than a year now. He loves to look at his drawings and often finds inspiration for his OWN potential inventions.

SO ... we jumped into this project with both feet! We sat down and wrote out a list of about 20 questions we would try to answer about da Vinci before writing the monologue. And to get us into the spirit of becoming the great man, we decided we'd try our hand at one of his inventions as well. Aided by a fun book we picked up last summer, we settled on da Vinci's "water gloves" for this exercise.

According to the book, the gloves seem to be part of an outfit designed to help people float, especially in emergency situations. Here is our version:



Da Vinci's version would likely have been made of leather and tied with string around the wrists, while rubber kitchen gloves were our starting point this time. We both find it fun that da Vinci modeled his gloves on the feet of geese, ducks, and other water fowl. Our version also has that feel and we are both certain that they would make really good flippers if we put them to use.

This project is just the first we plan to do as part of our research on Leonardo, so expect to see more as we get closer to the due date!