Snakes and ladders: Leonardo da Vinci

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Planning sheet 1 Your task is to create your own chronological list of the main events in the life of Leonardo da Vinci. Once you have completed your list with at least ten events, you can label them as positive, negative, or factual in the final column of the table. Three events have been done as an example.

Event (keep this list in chronological order)

Year Was this event

positive (P), negative (N) or just factual (F)?

Leonardo da Vinci is born near Florence, Italy. 1452 F

He is sent to Florence to be apprenticed to a famous sculptor called Verrocchio.

About 1466

P

His mural The Last Supper starts fading. He doesn’t get paid!

1496 N

Snakes and ladders: Leonardo da Vinci

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Planning sheet 2

Event Year

Was this event positive (P),

negative (N) or just factual (F)?

Leonardo da Vinci is born near Florence, Italy. 1452

He is sent to Florence to be apprenticed to a famous sculptor called Verrocchio.

About 1466

Leonardo da Vinci qualifies as a master artist. 1472

He establishes his own workshop. 1478

He moves to Milan to work for the ruling Sforza family as an engineer, sculptor, painter and architect.

1482

He starts to paint a mural of The Last Supper in the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.

1495

His mural The Last Supper starts fading. He doesn’t get paid! 1496

Milan was invaded by the French and the Sforza family and Leonardo are forced to flee.

1499

He paints the Mona Lisa. 1503 to

1506

He returns to Milan. 1506

He is invited by the French King Francis I, work in France as the ‘first painter, architect, and engineer to the King’!

1516

He dies. 1519

Snakes and ladders: Leonardo da Vinci

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Board game template

30 31 32 33

Finish!

29 28 27 26 25

20 21 22 23 24

19 18 17 16 15

10 11 12 13 14

9 8 7 6 5

Start!

1 2 3 4

Snakes and ladders: Leonardo da Vinci

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Instructions:

Create a board game based on the life and work of Leonardo Imagine you have been asked by a games company to produce a board game which will give the

people who play it an overview of Leonardo’s life and work. They would like you to aim it at

primary school children, so you will need to word it appropriately for this audience. As the

game will be for young children it needs to be fairly easy to play and the company has suggested

that a ‘Snakes and Ladders’ format might be suitable to show the ups and downs of Leonardo’s

life. It is essential that people who play the game should leave the game feeling that they have

learnt something about Leonardo da Vinci — both his life and his work. This is your brief and

your success criteria.

Step by step

1) Use pencil to mark on the events from Leonardo da Vinci’s life in separate squares. You can leave some squares blank.

2) Sketch the position of ladders for the positive events in his life and snakes for the biggest negatives. In order to make the game work you might need to reposition some events but you need to keep the chronology accurate! Not all positive/negative events need to have a ladder/snake.

3) When you are happy with all the positions mark them on in pen.

4) You could also add illustrations of Leonardo’s artworks to the blank squares.

Instructions:

Create a board game based on the life and work of Leonardo Imagine you have been asked by a games company to produce a board game which will give the

people who play it an overview of Leonardo’s life and work. They would like you to aim it at

primary school children, so you will need to word it appropriately for this audience. As the

game will be for young children it needs to be fairly easy to play and the company has suggested

that a ‘Snakes and Ladders’ format might be suitable to show the ups and downs of Leonardo’s

life. It is essential that people who play the game should leave the game feeling that they have

learnt something about Leonardo da Vinci — both his life and his work. This is your brief and

your success criteria.

Step by step

1) Use pencil to mark on the events from Leonardo da Vinci’s life in separate squares. You can leave some squares blank.

2) Sketch the position of ladders for the positive events in his life and snakes for the biggest negatives. In order to make the game work you might need to reposition some events but you need to keep the chronology accurate! Not all positive/negative events need to have a ladder/snake.

3) When you are happy with all the positions mark them on in pen.

4) You could also add illustrations of Leonardo’s artworks to the blank squares.

Snakes and ladders: Leonardo da Vinci

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Teaching notes

Planning

There are two versions of the planning table depending on whether you wish your

students to research the key events of Leonardo’s life (planning sheet 1), or just to

categorise them (planning sheet 2). Alternatively you could use these to differentiate

for higher/lower ability students.

You may want to direct your students to the following websites as sources of information:

www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/da_vinci_leonardo.shtml

www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/336408/Leonardo-da-Vinci

The textbook The Renaissance (SHP: Discovering the Past) is another excellent source of

information.

Other sites:

www.leonardoda-vinci.org/biography.html

www.biography.com/people/leonardo-da-vinci-40396

These two sites have detailed information but include a reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s

acquittal for sodomy at the age of 22, which you may deem inappropriate for your class.

Making the board game

Students can work individually or in groups to make the game. They need to use their

categorisation of Leonardo’s life events as positive, negative or factual. Positive events

can be the starting point of a ladder, and negative events a snake. Factual events can

be added as normal squares. It is strongly suggested that they use pencil to plot out the

position of each of the squares, snakes and ladders.

You could encourage them to illustrate their boards with their own versions of

Leonardo’s artwork (possibly in the correct chronological order for extra challenge!).

Alternatively use the accompanying PDF picture pack. This contains a selection of

images correctly sized to fit the board squares.

To play the game you will need: dice and 2 or more playing pieces or counters. You

could use the images from the picture pack as counters.