Story of the World Chapter Two Timeline Review

Our Story of the World Study looks mostly like this:

1. Week One: Listen to our current chapter on audiobook. Answer the quiz questions and review all prior quiz questions. Add the current quiz questions to the girls' list of material to practice daily that week.
2. Week Two: Listen again to our current chapter on audiobook. Complete the map work from the Story of the World Activity Book. Compare the completed map to our other geography references--Google Earth, our Montessori puzzle maps, our family atlas, etc.
3. Week Three: Read a picture book or watch a documentary related to our current study. Add new timeline cards to our materials, and glue them to our big basement timeline. Order all the timeline cards covered so far, and add ordering the timeline cards to the girls' list of material to practice daily that week.
4. Weeks Four and Beyond: Read more picture books, watch more documentaries, and complete other unit-based hands-on studies and related memory work until at least one of the kids feels ready to move on.

I always think it's exciting to add new material to our big basement timeline: 

It's still not a project that the girls ever show a lot of interest in outside of the school-time study that we do with it (although they do always perk up when I suggest putting something that they're otherwise interested in, some book or myth, on the timeline), but it makes me, personally, very happy to have it, and I think that one of these days they'll grow into it and get excited about it and take ownership of it.

Since we come back to Egypt again in Chapter 4, for Chapter 2 we'll be doing projects that deal specifically with the geography and mythology of Ancient Egypt. For books, I've checked out every single story about Egyptian gods and goddesses from our public library (yes, I AM that obnoxious!), and my hope is to have the girls record some sort of family tree/genealogy for each figure, as well as a summary of some of their stories. I'm not yet sure how this will work--a homemade book with a page for each figure and brief summaries, as well as video recordings of the girls re-telling their stories, perhaps?

Other projects that are in the running, as long as interest holds out:

• cookie map of Egypt--The girls are CONSTANTLY on the lookout for things to recreate in cookie form! I think we'll do a cookie of modern Egypt, and decorate with frosting and candy to represent the boundaries of Ancient Egypt, the Nile, and the location of major ancient monuments.
• A Coloring Book of Ancient Egypt depicting tomb art (we can do more of these in Chapter 4, when the pyramids are discussed)
• map of Ancient Egypt flip book
• labeled map of Ancient Egypt coloring page
• interpretations of the myths--I want to keep encouraging the girls to think about how stories are continually re-interpreted and used to give different meanings to different times (this will help when SOTW begins to avidly re-tell the Christian myths), so I'm considering having us watch Stargate all together, or listen to the audiobook of The Red Pyramid, which both contain some really fun re-interpretations of Egyptian mythology.
• paper models of the Egyptian gods and goddesses
• posters of the Egyptian gods and goddesses for matching games and memory work
• I SUPER want to buy these Egyptian gods and goddesses toys!!! I won't, though.
• Egyptian gods and goddesses coloring pages--these would be perfect for the book that I want the girls to make.

Okay, that's a crazy amount of projects, but it's okay, because we only have to do the fun ones.

And two chapters later, we can start mummifying things!

Cave Painting with Story of the World Ancient Times

Why yes, we HAVE been on chapter 1 of volume 1 of The Story of the World for about six months now!

The girls enjoy listening to the audiobooks of all four volumes of Story of the World (which I've burned to mp3 and put on my ipod), so I'd say that they've been skipping around quite a bit of history in their free time, but just when I think that we're ready to move on to, I don't know, chapter TWO?!?, somebody (me) thinks up or comes across another activity related to chapter 1, and somebody else (them) gets hyped up to do it, so there we go.

This time? Cave painting.

Including Paleolithic-era cave painting might be stretching even Bauer's definition of "from the earliest nomads" a little bit, but especially because the girls and I have spent so much time exploring prehistory and the evolution of the earliest humans on our own, I liked the idea of bridging the gap, so to speak, with an activity that connected early nomads to later ones, and I thought it was important to bring more historical (nomads didn't ONLY roam in 7,000 BCE) and geographical context (nomads didn't ONLY roam in the Fertile Crescent) to the study.

Because nomads made lots of cool cave art in lots of cool places during lots of different time periods. My favorite cave painting web sites are these two from France:

• Chauvet Cave
• Lascaux Cave--this site is AMAZING, just so you know. It's a virtual walk-through of the cave, down to the tiniest detail, and you can zoom up in even more detail on each piece of art that you pass, as well as get more information on it.

The Cueva de las Manos in Argentina is also a pretty great cave, but its web site is nothing fancy. 

To make our own cave art, I first created a cave environment by cutting open a ton of brown paper grocery bags and duct taping them all over a wall. The girls' loft bed was still against the wall at that time, so I taped the bags right over the planks of the bed that were against the wall, adding some dimension to the cave, since that was very important to many cave artists. 

Since the cave was a temporary installation, I prepared several pots of tempera (tempera's quality is crap, so it's unsuited to make any art that you want to keep, but it's so cheap that it's perfect for process-based work), and handed it all off to the kids:

I didn't give the kids any instructions (other than "We only paint on the brown paper") but we've read so many books about cave art, and seen so many visual examples, that I shouldn't be surprised at how traditional their work was:

It ended up as QUITE the fabulous cave:

Because we'd all been so intrigued by our study of Cueva de las Manos, I set up a second smaller cave wall specifically to do hand stencils. I used our liquid watercolors in spritz bottles, which work great on brown paper bags:

It was REALLY messy--of COURSE!--but turned out great. The kids both stenciled both of their hands (spritzing that bottle is an excellent fine motor-strengthening activity, especially for the non-dominant hand), and I even convinced Matt that he should join me in stenciling our hands, too, so that we ended up with a Paleolithic family portrait, of sorts:

Other than the aforementioned web sites, here are the other resources that we pored over to learn about cave painting:

• Recipe and Craft Guide to France
• Art: The Definitive Visual Guide
• The Cave Painter of Lascaux
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams
• Europe before Rome

Pumpkinbear on Pinterest

Do you pin?

Oh, my goodness, do I pin!

I have my own little Pumpkinbear Pinterest land right here:


On it you can see my seemingly millions of boards, all neurotically categorized.

I have board for projects organized by theme:

  

I have holiday boards, with projects and recipes and crafts and homeschool unit studies:

   

I have recipe boards, some for recipes that I want to make--

--and some for recipes that I make all the time:

I have boards for projects that are imminent to-dos:

 

 I have homeschool boards:

    

I have idea boards:

  

 I have boards for projects organized by material:

 

And those aren't even ALL my boards.

Also, because I'm a big nerd with a library science degree, I curate my boards, which means that I go through them, perfect the links, cross-reference them to relevant boards, and edit the commentary to be descriptive, accurate, and informative.

I can't believe how useful Pinterest has been for me. I use it to brainstorm for homeschool activities within the girls' areas of interest, and for holiday projects and kid crafts. I try new recipes from Pinterest (I've got these cranberry sauce meatballs in the crock pot right now!), and if I like them, then I move them to my Favorite Family Foods pinboard so that I can find them again easily.

Didn't people used to use file cabinets for stuff like that? Geez, wasn't that a fire hazard?

A Font from My Own Hand

When I was little, I always wanted to be the kind of girl whose handwriting was girly. Other girls could produce these wonderful fat bubble letters with curliques and flourishes--my handwriting was all crabby and awkward, primarily since my fat little hand couldn't seem to move nearly as fast as my fat little mind. It was pretty neat--I mean, I did get a lot of practice and all, what with regularly writing 60-page animal-rescue adventures stories, but no, it was nothing special.

Which doesn't mean that my handwriting doesn't deserve to be memorialized. Because oh, it totally does.

I've seen off and on the odd program that makes fonts from your own handwriting, but it always cost a pittance to use, and you know how I feel about that. But all this weekend I've been playing with a new beta from fontcapture, and although I'm not going to write my next seminar paper in my brand new Julie Handwriting Font or anything, it is fun for playing with:
It's freaky, because the font is created very simply, from a worksheet that you print out, fill out, scan back into your computer, and then upload to the site, but this font looks EXACTLY like my handwriting. Exactly. Dead on.

Matt's font doesn't look as much like his actual handwriting, in my opinion (I'm pretty sure that when he writes, his lowercase letters are just smaller versions of his capital letters--hoo-ah, public school!), but can you believe he was stupid enough to provide me with the means to produce a font that mimics his handwriting even this closely?Mwa-ha-ha! Don't tell him, but I'm likely to use this font to write out little contracts to myself that promise me things, or letters of guilt and apology, etc.

We even got our Willow into the act. It was a challenge, because the grid in which you're supposed to write each letter is a little on the small side for a five-year-old's fine motor skills to easily handle, so some of her letters are cut off at the top or bottom. If I ever wanted to use her handwriting font to do more than just goof around, I'd likely have her fill out several of these worksheets (she loves them), then cut and paste between them in Photoshop to make the most workable choice for each letter. We're just goofing, though, and besides, there's something else big on her mind these days. To wit:

It actually does look pretty much like her handwriting, although I don't know what's going on with the spacing between words.

So I'm thinking that these handwriting fonts would be super-cool for scrapbooking. I also have a plan to go home over the holidays and collect the handwriting fonts for all my relatives, because it just seems like a kind of cool keepsake to have. I

It seems kind of creepy, though, in some ways, to collect my family's handwriting as fonts on my computer. Handwriting is so individual and personal, it's like collecting their hair or something.

Of course, not all of my relatives have hair, but they do all have handwriting.