Starting off our study of Ancient Egypt!
As a treat, I got the kids a pyramid puzzle, which Brianna seems to be the only one capable of doing.
Building pyramids from clay and straws. You can see the completed puzzle here, as well. Brianna's straw pyramid has 4 sides.
Eli's straw pyramid has 5 sides.
Then we made cardstock pyramids and covered them in glue and sand. We had to mix colors to get just the right shade of sand.
Eli added trees to his pyramid.
Brianna models the double crown of Menes.
We are working on memorizing the books of the Bible this year. I found these bookmarks online, and we cut them out and added our own ribbons to them. I saw this, too, but I just couldn't bring myself to write on our Legos.
Remember all the flags from last year? These are modern Egyptian flags, but since the kids had enjoyed the flag part of last year so much, I thought they'd like these.
I'm glad we get to spend a decent amount of time on Egypt this year. Some of the countries we hit last year, I could have done way more than 2 weeks in, but I felt like I had to stick to the schedule. It's good; we got through the whole year and learned about many interesting countries instead of just a few, but I can certainly understand families that dig in and spend more time on each place.
We made "cuneiform" tablets of cookie dough.
Writing in cuneiform is harder than you would think.
But if you mess up, you can still eat the results, so that's good.
We also celebrated Autumn Moon Festival this week. This is not part of our homeschooling, but rather part of our family culture. Moon Festival is a Chinese holiday, and since our family is part Chinese, we choose to celebrate it. Of course, we put our own spin on it!
Our version of Moon Festival involves eating ROUND foods because the moon is round. So we had circular pasta, meatballs, peas, salad made from cucumbers and cherry tomatoes, and little wax covered round cheeses. And powdered donut holes. It's fun to hit the grocery store and see what round foods pop out at us each year. Pizza is a good one, too.
This is a mooncake! The yellow is an egg yolk. This year's variety is "mixed nuts" (appropriate for our family) and had pumpkin seeds and walnuts, along with other tidbits.
Mooncakes are a traditional food for the celebration, and they are meant to be shared.
They come in a pretty tin, with a plastic knife for splitting them into pieces. Paul picked these up at Costco.
When the family sat down to eat, I read this book aloud to them.
Even Lukey likes mooncakes.
After dinner, we went outside to look at the moon and light our lantern.
Paul insisted on tethering the lantern this time so I tied a string on it.
Unfortunately, we ripped a hole in it, and never got it up in the air (there was a breeze, too), but it's always fun to be out in the street setting things on fire in the dark, and I think the kids had fun whether the lantern malfunctioned or not.
And that was our week! So far next week looks pretty tame, appointment wise, except for Wednesday, so hopefully we'll get to spend a lot of time learning.
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