Homemade History, Week 10

No pictures today; they simply didn't happen this week.  Not that we did a lot of things that were photogenic.  This will also be short.  My back is spasming, and sitting hurts.

Week 10 Topic:  Crete - Minoans and Mycenaeans

Monday:  Reading, notes, timeline.  Our timeline died the ugly death this week after the whiteboard jumped off the wall and attempted to maul Doodlebug, so I broke down and simply ordered a book of completed timelines from Amazon rather than trying to redo our own.  So from now on, we'll simply be finding the people we're studying on the timeline vs. creating our own.  I'm okay with that.  Reading options were:  Story of the World Ch. 18 and the first half of Ch. 19, Usborne World History Encyclopedia pp. 126-127, Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World pp. 64-67, and Kingfisher History Encyclopedia pp. 16-17.

Tuesday:  Map Trek map of early Greece (the kids recently finished reading various versions of the Iliad and were delighted to learn where Troy was, and I pointed out Ithaca for good measure since they'll be reading simplified versions of the Odyssey soon) and they picked topics for their next history papers.  Doodlebug chose Cretan crafting and architecture; Boo chose Japanese mythology.

Wednesday:  I let the kids make a book of the ancient Greek gods.  It was one of the projects in the Ancient Greece book that I have an e-copy of.  They enjoyed that.  We also watched some videos, specifically this one on Knossos and this one on the Mycenaeans.  We also watched several bull jumping videos; their favorite was this one.

Thursday:  Definitions (from History Pockets - agora, chiton, column, and myth) and critical thinking questions - 1) Would you have preferred to live with the Minoans or the Mycenaeans?  Why?  2) Would you have wanted to be a bull jumper?

Friday:  For their project, I asked them to make a labyrinth.  I gave them the choice of using Legos and other 'real' materials or just drawing a maze, and they both opted to just use graph paper and draw their mazes.  It was a good challenge for both of them, and they enjoyed it.  I was surprised how much they got out of it; the amount of time they spent on it gave them an appreciation for how long it would have taken for Daedalus (or whoever) to design a labyrinth, let alone construct one.

Next week:  Bronze Age Europe - henges, palisades, farming methods

Homemade History, Week 9

History was sort of History Lite this week because of the other projects we had going, but the kids requested and therefore we still did a sort of history study.  I'll put in all the stuff that could be used in case you want to do a full week, but we didn't do it all.  No way, Jose.

Week 9 Topic:  Indus Valley Civilizations, Hindu

Monday:  Reading, summary, timeline - Story of the World (Chs. 9 and 30), Life in the Ancient Indus River Valley (pp. 1-15), Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World (pp. 52-57), Kingfisher History Encyclopedia (pp. 14-15, 33), and Usborne World History Encyclopedia (pp. 118-119, 174) were all given options.  The kids poked through some of the choices, and I requested a book from the library on Hinduism for each of them.

Tuesday:  Map Trek map of ancient India and discussion of Hindu gods.  We didn't get around to the discussion, but we did the map.  Score one for geography.

Wednesday:  Definitions (plateau, plain, citadel, caste) and critical thinking questions:  What do you think happened to the people who lived in Mohenjo-Daro?  What do you think of a caste system?  Can you think of anything that's good about it?  Anything bad?  (Doodlebug couldn't think of a single good thing about it unless you were in the upper castes.  He was quite indignant.  We just answered these orally this week.)

Thursday:  We didn't do anything on Thursday since we were out of the house for most of the day, but the plan had been to watch some videos on the ancient Indus Valley peoples like this one on an ancient Aryan settlement or a Crash Course video on the Indus Valley civilizations (note: no mention of scoodily-pooping in this one).  Or maybe let them poke around on the BBC site about Hinduism or a similar BBC Kids site on the Indus Valley.

Friday:  I had planned to let the kids make rangoli again - giant rangoli on giant pieces of concrete in the driveway and/or on giant pieces of paper that we could save and hang up for Diwali, but the weather didn't cooperate.  Hard to make sand art on wet concrete.  The kids, however, decided that they weren't to be denied, so they chose to make candles.  They initially wanted to make their own little terra-cotta pinch pots and fill those, but when Boo started poking around in her craft supplies, she realized she had a soy candle-making kit and they decided that would probably be safer and easier.  I agreed.

They want to place these out on Diwali (November 3) and maybe make some rangoli between now and then as an art project.  I'm not about to argue.

Next week (well, OK, this week... I'm behind, I know):  Crete - Minoans, Mycenaeans.  

Homemade History, Week 8

The kids turned in their papers this week.  I thought they did well, and I may post those separately.  Or not.  I haven't decided yet.  For week 9, even though it's primarily an interest-led week, the kids will still be doing history and math and a couple other electives.  So I'll be back next weekend with yet another installment.

Week 8 Topic: Phoenicians and Sea Peoples

Monday:  Reading and timeline.  Reading options came from Story of the World (Ch. 15), Kingfisher History Encyclopedia (pp. 28-29), Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World (pp. 88-91), and/or the Usborne World History Encyclopedia (pp. 144-145).  Boo was fascinated with the idea of city-states and alliances between the cities.

Tuesday:  We filled in the Phoenicia's Trading Empire map from Map Trek and they started typing up their papers.

Wednesday:  Videos!  We watched a bunch:  One on glassblowing (we also searched for Phoenician glass images so they could see some of the stuff the Phoenicians actually produced), one on the Phoenician Ship Expedition, and one on extracting dye.  There's another video out there, called Quest for the Phoenicians, that is available in parts on Youtube or for legitimate sale in the National Geographic Store, that we caught the preview for.  I may check it out another time, because both kids really, really like the Phoenician peoples.

Thursday:  Definitions (city-state, colony, obelisk, alphabet) and Doodlebug's critical thinking questions (What were some advantages and disadvantages of having cooperating city-states vs. a unified country?  Which of the Phoenician's inventions [alphabet, dye methods, glassblowing, shipbuilding, colonization, etc.] is the most significant to us today?  Why do you think that?)

Friday:  I was going to suggest that the kids help me make pita bread, but they had other (and better!) ideas.  Doodlebug decided he wanted me to find him a map of Mediterranean currents and winds so that he could work out different sailing routes that the Phoenicians would have used to get to their colonies.

Boo decided she wanted to see if she could build her own boat.

Both kids ran into different problems with their projects - Boo had originally wanted to make a curved boat and Doodlebug wanted to figure out one route that would work for all seasons - but they both overcame their frustrations and were happy with their final results... even if the boat didn't float for more than a few seconds before sinking catastrophically.

Next week:  The Indus Valley, Mohenjo-Daro, Hindu beliefs

Homemade History, Week 7

Just as we get into the really interesting stuff, it's time for a break.  It's Labor Day week here in the ol' US of A, and I don't do four-day weeks.  I find them unproductive.  So instead, we just take the entire week off.  Since we've been going hard for seven weeks, it's time.  This first block is one of the longest continuous stretches of school we'll have all year.

Week 7 Topic:  Egypt's Old Kingdom + mastabas, pyramids, mummies

Monday:  Reading and notes.  The kids picked two of the following choices:  Story of the World chapters 2 and 4, Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World pages 28-31, Usborne World History Encyclopedia pages 114-117, or Life in Ancient Egypt pages 4-9, 20-22, and 26-27.

Tuesday:  The kids finished their reading, and we noted any necessary revisions to their nine weeks' papers.  They'll finish revising the paper and type them up in weeks 8 and 9, and hopefully I'll be allowed to post their work here.  Doodlebug especially has surprised me - he decided to write his paper entirely from second-person perspective.  It's an odd choice, but I think it works.

Wednesday:  We filled in a map of Ancient Egypt, complete with the locations of pyramids, ancient cities along the Nile, and the general geography in and around Egypt like the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Sahara.

Thursday:  Definitions (hieroglyphics, pyramid, pharaoh, and papyrus - Doodlebug was fascinated with the method of making papyrus) and critical thinking questions:  How did geography affect the lives of ancient Egyptians?  What were some of the problems that Pharaoh may have faced?  That second question is to get him thinking about the problems all rulers face, but he doesn't know that yet.

Friday:  On Friday the kids played a game called Mummy Maker on the BBC Kids web site.  Then they wanted to make their own cartouches.  We discussed the function of a true cartouche, and then I told the kids that if they wanted to make their own, they had a choice.  I could look up some close hieroglyphic representations of their names and they could make Egyptian cartouches or they could make their own indecipherable cartouches based on their interests and things that are important to them.  Of course, being Generation 2.0 children, they wanted their own custom images.  Doodlebug made his out of clay; Boo made hers from paper.  Both are designed to be hung from strings like necklaces so they could, theoretically, wear their cartouches everywhere.

I have to say, you can see the differences between them just by looking at the images!

I also gave them options of making scented oil - basil, rosemary, garlic - or virtually touring the inside of the Great Pyramid.  These are definitely other project/video options to consider.

Week 8 Topic (when we return):  Phoenicians and "Sea People"

Homemade History, Week 5

This is our last week of traveling around the world at what seems like warp time/speed.  In week 6, we're headed back to Mesopotamia.  Still, this week was fun!  We watched several videos, sketched maps, and even built our own version of a calendar in the round.

Week 5 Topic:  Ancient America - Mesoamerica, Olmecs and Maya

Monday:  Reading and notes.  M2 read the Story of the World (chapter 26) and Usborne World History (pp. 178-181); M1 read the Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World (pp. 130-137) and the Usborne pages as well.

Tuesday:  The kids worked on their papers.  M1 felt especially prepared for this week's lesson due to the studying he'd already been doing on the Olmecs, so I let him share some of his findings with M1 and me.  He liked that.  

Wednesday:  We put together a map on Wednesday.  We started by using a blank black-line map of the Americas, both north and south.  Using the following maps, we drew a rough map of SOME of the ancient tribes in the Americas:

Eastern North America

Southwestern North America

Mesoamerica

We also talked a bit about the fact that there were tribes in what is now Canada, South America, etc. but that they simply aren't discussed very often and that we aren't going to cover them in this class... and I made sure the kids were aware that not all of these tribes overlapped, either.  It's hard to pick and choose, ya know? 

I also gave M2 his questions on Wednesday:  

1.  Would you have preferred living with the Olmecs or the Maya? (The Olmecs won his vote.)

2.  Both of these peoples played ball games.  If you were going to invent a ball game, what would you call it?  What would some of the rules be?  (M1 really liked this question and came up with a sort of hand ball/lacrosse game that I thought would be quite interesting.)  

Thursday:  We started with definitions (temple, sacrifice, fortification, peninsula) and moved from there to videos.  We didn't watch all of this video on the Olmecs, but we did watch some of it; we also watched this video on Mayan math.

Friday:  Friday project!  First, we watched this short video about the basics of the Mayan calendar.  I explained to the kids that the Maya didn't have weeks - only years, months, and days, as well as longer epochs on the (not shown in the video) Long Count calendar.  This confused the heck out of M2, so we set out to make our own mostly-Mayan-based calendar in the round.  Wikipedia to the rescue! Soon after (and I apologize for the poor photography) we constructed our own calendar in the round.  The kids loved finding their birthdays in rough Mayan equivalent.  Some other activities that we considered were resurrecting the atlatl idea, drinking spiced hot chocolate, and playing around with Mayan math/numbers (which M1 had done in the past).

Next week:  The Fertile Crescent/Mesopotamia, Sumerians, Akkadians

Homemade History, Week 4

This week was an odd week for us, mostly because we decided not to do school on Friday and the kids had decided to squeeze any potential Friday work into the previous four days.  So I have a few things that we didn't do this week that we could have done in the extra day.  I'll put them in here, just in case you're interested.

Week 4 Topic:  Ancient Americas - Folsom, Clovis, Anasazi, Hopewells

Monday:  Reading and notes, as usual, from the Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World (pp. 124-129) and the Usborne World History Encyclopedia (pp. 176-177).

Tuesday:  I let the kids read their books for their papers and take notes.  They also did this on Thursday, and they're pretty close to being done with note-taking, at least from the library books.  Both kids also have a bunch of questions that the books didn't answer that they want to research on the Internet.  That'll probably show up on the schedule in the next week or two.  After they got done taking a few notes, we watched some movies.  The PBS videos that weren't working a couple of weeks ago actually are available now, and we watched probably five or six of the clips, and the kids want to sit down and watch some of the full episodes another day.

Wednesday:  Definitions (adobe, atlatl, culture, and population) and critical thinking questions for M1:  "Would you prefer to live in an adobe home or an Inuit igloo?" (He prefers a warm climate to a cold one.) and "What do you think it was like to hunt mammoth and other megafauna?"  (The videos we'd watched on Tuesday colored his answer significantly.)

Thursday:  This was our final day of work for this week.  I'd checked out a video on the mound builder cultures from the library, and we watched it.  It was about 30 minutes long, and while I thought it was fairly dry, the kids were upset when it ended.  So I guess they got something out of it.  They also added to their notes, as I mentioned.

Friday:  OK, we didn't do this stuff, but what I had planned to do was to take some of M1's arrows and try to use them as small throwing spears to see how difficult it was to hit a target.  I also wanted to hunt down some videos or web sites about how archaeologists know where to dig for sites relating to prehistory.  I still might do these at some point.

Next week:  The Ancient Americas - Mesoamerica and the Olmecs

Always in Motion

The last week has been such a blur.  I hardly know where to begin.

We have our usual schedule - swim three times a week, violin once though M2 is very good about practicing most of the other days, library once a week, and Mondays and Fridays at home.  This week, though, changed a bit, and I have to admit it threw me for a loop.

First, M1 had to get an allergy shot on Tuesday.  For about six months, that had been a normal weekly occurrence.  For the last few months, though, he's only had to go once a month, and now that it isn't happening every week it seems like such a horrid inconvenience.  It's been very nice not to have to dope him up on Zyrtec every day, however, and he can live in his bedroom without being bothered by all the dust mites that no doubt inhabit every inch of the carpet. 

On Friday, we attended a co-op meeting.  This particular co-op is only just getting off the ground, so I'm not 100% sold on it yet.  The kids both enjoyed it, but if it was meant to be an educational experience, it wasn't.  And given the number of younger kids - ages 5 and under - I'm not sure how much of an opportunity it will be.  We shall see.  But I promised the kids we would go back and give it a fair shake before deciding one way or the other.  It does mean, though, that Fridays have to be rearranged somewhat, because a full day of school isn't going to happen if there's a co-op meeting involved.

This weekend was particularly special for us, too.  We hosted a housewarming party!  If I was any sort of good blogger, I'd have been going around shoving a camera in people's faces and taking photos of all the merriment that was had by all... but I'm not, and I didn't.  Merriment, however, filled our home.  At one point, I went upstairs to check on the kids in the game room, and they were laughing and having a wonderful time (no fights! and the floors were visible!); I turned to come back down the stairs and the adults were doing exactly the same thing.  It was a beautiful chaos.  I got to see my friends, see (most of) their kids, share laughter and stories and food... after everyone left, I couldn't stop smiling until I collapsed into bed.

Tomorrow we have a meeting here, and then we're back into the swing of a 'regular' week again.  Sort of.  Next weekend I have plans, too, and then the weekend after is when we're celebrating M1's 10th birthday.

Time really does fly when you're having fun.  I'm so lucky to have the ability to do so much and have met such wonderful people to share it all with.  No matter where you are, take a moment, savor your life as it is RIGHT NOW, and never forget we're all in this crazy world together!