Homeschool Coat of Arms

I got it done!!  Wahoo!

I mentioned earlier that last year while studying the Middle Ages we covered knights and their Coats of Arms.  While studying them each of my kids made their own Coat of Arms, and we liked them so much we stuck them on the wall, leaving them up all school year.

And then I got a great idea.  A fantastic idea.

Why not make another (slightly larger) Coat of Arms to represent us and our homeschool?

I wanted to do it last year, but never got around to it so I stuck it first on the list this year.

Before we designed our Coat of Arms, Makenna gave a short oral report based of a written report she did last year detailing a lot of the symbolism found in Coats of Arms.  If you want to check it out (or have one of your older kids prepare a report to give you), she found a lot of her information on this website.

It's actually really cool.  Different colors, lines, patterns and animals all have different meanings.  With all the different options, you can have your Coat of Arms say almost anything.

Our final Coat of Arms is 17 x 22 inches (which is four pieces of 8.5 x 11 paper put together).  To practice what we wanted, I first printed off all the different sections separately and let the kids practice their design.

After they got it perfected (or had at least made up their minds), I printed off a single large copy for them to work on.

Look, aren't they working so well together (yes, I forgot to take pictures while they were working on their rough draft)?

I love how James is laughing in this picture.  They were concentrating so very hard and trying to make it look perfect.

And this is how it turned out.  I have to admit that the boys didn't really pick what to draw based off symbolism, they just picked things they thought were cool.  I liked that each of them got their own section, but it was brought together with both the border and the smaller inset shield.

Guess what?  Just in case some of you would like to make your own, I've made a handy dandy pdf for you and uploaded it to google docs.  In it is the large scale print and five smaller 8.5 x 11's that you can use for your rough draft like I did, or you can tape them together for your final copy (if you don't have access to a large printer or want to pay to print one).

Have a great day,
Leah