In the weeks before public and charter schools were required to close due to COVID-19 concerns, fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade students at Sedona Charter School were learning about a different pandemic.

As part of their medi­eval studies for the spring semester, they participated in a Black Death bubonic plague simulation with dice.

“We have 24 cities in Europe and the kids are going to be traveling in groups of three, rolling a dice to see how long they stay in the city,” teacher Maija Alanen said on Feb. 21, before the simulation. “They’re going to draw little squares and there’s a good chance that they might draw a ‘Black Death square,’ and if so they still travel to two more cities and eventually the more Black Death that happens, the more Black Death squares go into the villages.”

If the students “got” the Black Plague, they would tape a skull to their fore­head to show that they were infected.

“But very, very rarely [the diseased] would survive, so if they roll a one twice in a row, they actually clear,” Alanen said at the time.

In retrospect, the idea of kids simulating a pandemic when the world was then on the verge of facing a real one might seem alarming, but just five weeks ago, the scope of COVID-19 wasn’t nearly as real. The simula­tion was just one of the many ways that Alanen’s students were not just learning about — but experiencing — life in the Middle Ages before online classes commenced.

“We had a catapult chal­lenge where groups of three to five kids would work on a catapult together and then we launched marshmal­lows,” Alanen said of the science projects. “Everyone had the same supplies, so they were made out of Popsicle sticks, rubber bands, spoons, clothespins and string. That’s all they could use.”

Alanen said one of the student teams’ catapults managed to launch a marsh­mallow about 65 feet. As for the longships they built out of clay, paper and wooden sticks, sleds filled with water were adequate to test their buoyancy — some of which might have met the Viking inventors’ high standards.

The Montessori philos­ophy involves hands-on learning rather than relying on textbooks or paper packets. Instead of a class­room with rows of desks and chairs, Montessori classrooms like those in SCS have a large expanse of space with materials for independent learning and tables for small group lessons with one of the six teachers. For the Upper Elementary classroom, 61 students in grades 4 to 6 use the space.

“We had a monks’ meal, where we turned the class­room into a monastery and had all of the tables in a row,” Alanen said of another medieval simula­tion. “[The students] made a simple soup and bread and we ate in silence — 61 kids in silence — and we listened to quiet music and had reverence — [learning] what they had to go through — like a time of reflection.”

The art electives also turned medieval in the weeks before the school’s closure. The students made illuminations of their first initials, decorated in gold, silver or vibrant colors to mimic the lettering of ancient texts. Students designed Magna Cartas with stained papers. Instead of rights and protections for the church and limitations to the feudal crown as the original 1215 A.D. version outlined, students wrote their own school rules.

Some students even learned to make chainmail jewelry.

For that project, Sedona artist and former SCS mother Wendy Weidman teamed up with Alanen through the Artist in the Classroom program.

“When they said that they were doing medieval times I ended up doing some research to find out, ‘what do I have around’ and ‘what did they create back then,’ so I kind of combined both of those,” Weidman said of coming up with the chain­mail art idea.

While artisans in the Middle Ages used chain­mail to design armor rather than earrings, Weidman said the girls in the group who participated “learned how tricky it is to just bend little hoops all day” and opted for smaller feats.

“We were learning about how back then it would have been a guild that was just in charge of creating [the metal hoops] and another one that was just in charge of putting them together,” Weidman said, relating the process to an assembly line.

She gave the girls the option of working together to all create parts for one piece like they would have in guilds, but the group decided it would be easier — and more fun — to make their own.

Sixth-grader Arianna Sapatch said the most inter­esting thing that she learned from the chainmail making was “probably that some­body took the time to do all of this and had to do all this tedious work.” Besides chainmail making, she was surprised “how much work they put in to do everything in their life, like cooking, making their clothes and everything like that.”

The week before spring break, the SCS students took their learning a step further when they embodied a character of their choice from the medieval era in a “Panel from the Past.”

Parents were invited to interview King Arthur, Leonardo da Vinci, Joan of Arc and others born between A.D. 476 A.D. and A.D. 1453 — the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the fall of Constantinople to the .

The students were asked questions like where and when their characters were born, what made them famous, if they faced any challenges in their lives and more. The students researched these facts about their characters beforehand and wrote them up in one-to two-page essays, then memorized them for the panel.

“We used the internet a lot,” said sixth-grader Lucy Spielman, aka Genghis Khan. “We used a little bit of research from our history lessons.”

Spielman wore a Russian hat and full-bodied swim­ming parka to mimic the emperor of the Mongol Empire in his battle attire.

Sixth-grader Chokyi Carsten embodied Alfred the Great with a blanket thrown around his shoul­ders as a cape, a construc­tion-paper cutout beard and a Burger King crown. Chokyi admitted he was at first “terrified” of speaking in front of his peers and the parent audience “because I don’t like talking in front of people.”

However, Chokyi added that the activity helped him to learn more about Alfred the Great and “it just made me a little bit more confident.”

Chokyi’s mother, Danielle Carsten, helped Chokyi with his research and watched him and the other students perform in the panel.

“I thought it was a really creative way for them to present their characters,” she said. “I think essay writing is incredibly boring and they’re doing so much with that anyway that doing something like this is a lot more fun. It kind of brought the characters to life.”

Toward the end of the school year, Alanen was planning for the students to participate in a “Shakespeare Unshackled” musical as the history studies turned toward the Renaissance, but with the uncertainty of when and if the students will return to school this year, they may have to be writing more essays from home than originally planned.

Alexandra Wittenberg can be reached at 282-7795 ext 126 or at awittenberg@larsonnewspapers.com