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Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Fun with the Ancients {CC History Cycle 1}

Between all of our homeschool subjects, I think the general consensus is that history, yes HISTORY, is our favorite.  Science is also high up there, but the history thing just tickles me to no end.  You probably did not know that I was a history minor in college ... not for any particular reason, except that I liked it enough that I took so many classes I could actually minor in it.  I know, I know, I'm a bit strange.  Whatever though, history is COOL.

So in CC Cycle 1, we are studying the Ancients right now for memory work.  I am adapting the awesomeness of The Story of the World curriculum into the CC memory work and ohhhh we just love it.  Angel thinks the reading is a little boring (not me though, I think it's fascinating) but she absolutely adores all of the projects we've been doing ...

Painting hieroglyphs on real Papyrus paper from Egypt (serious coolness, she thought it was the greatest):



Flooding the Nile River with beautiful blue water:




Unfortunately they had a little too much fun with the flooding part and we didn't get to watch our grass seeds grow.  But I think the learning was definitely in the flooding process here :-)


Creating our own Egyptian Pyramids with sugar cubes (this was Angel's favorite):




Sunshine really enjoyed it too ... so after all of the sugar cubes had been ohhhed and ahhhed over by little fingers, I gathered them up into a sensory bin for later.



And making Sumerian seals out of air-dry clay like they did in the "old days" ...



Which eventually turned into "Art Day" as the kids had a blast designing these creations:


So are we having fun with history?  Um, yeah.  Seeing the kids just light up as we work through these projects has been really just awesome.  Having Angel tell me how much she LOVES homeschool ... ohmygoodness, melts my heart.  And Lovebug, who wasn't as big of a fan at first, is coming around, thankfully.  And Sunshine is just along for the ride ... sometimes she likes to play along a little too much and gets upset when she doesn't get a turn indefinitely.  So I think she gives homeschool two thumbs up also.

Going forward, I may just try to do one homeschool summary blog post each week ... I still need to figure that out so that homeschool doesn't take over my blog, hehe.  But I definitely want to document all of the fun (and ok, sometimes boring) things we are learning about!

4 comments:

  1. Ok, got your blog officially bookmarked. :) Love these hands on activities. I'll have to steal some of them! (I keep trying to comment as "open id" but it won't let me. Weird.)

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  2. I LOVE your homeschool posts! We just switched to a classical curriculum and I'm not very creative...so I will DEFINATELY be using some of your awesome ideas. Your sugar cube pyramid idea is brilliant!

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  3. I'm seriously impressed, Nicole! Nice work! Only a couple of weeks in and you are rockin this homeschoolin mama thing! :)

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