Recreating Ancient Sumerian Cuneiform in Clay

The kids have been excited about this project for a REALLY long while. I told them about it, but then made them burn through a few weeks of Story of the World review questions, map work, and timeline cards.

But finally, FINALLY the review questions were memorized, the maps were filled out and colored, and the timeline cards were glued to our big basement timeline. We'd seen documentaries and read books on cuneiform, and I'd received several nice jpegs of cuneiform artifacts in the British Museum's collection (including some of the actual Code of Hammurabi, so woot!), so when I dragged out the clay bin and printed some word and alphabet charts from Google, the kids were ready to dig right in.

I suggested that they could carve themselves the correct triangle-shaped stylus, but after looking through all our clay tools, the little kid tried out a screwdriver--

-- and then switched to a toothpick, and the big kid started right off with a toothpick. There's a nice awl in the clay tools that also would have worked, but I think the toothpicks fit their hands better and looked less intimidating to use.

On this particular day, I just wanted them to explore writing cuneiform on clay. The big kid tried several figures but got frustrated when they didn't turn out as she wanted, and ended up with just one, but the little kid really took off and ended up with several nice slabs of writing: 

They looked pretty well like the cuneiform characters, too!

I think we'll use these slabs for the experiment found in the Story of the World activity book, but on another day I'd like to set the activity up again, along with a cuneiform alphabet, and have the kids create their names as keepsakes.

We'll do that in a couple of months though, after our road trip, because we're going to see Gettysburg, and until then, we're officially Civil War buffs!

Here are some of the resources that we used to study cuneiform:

• The Lifeboat That Saved the World: a Mesopotamian myth retold by the Mesopotamia curator at the British Museum.
• Hands-on History Mesopotamia: we didn't do any of the hands-on projects this time, but this series always includes a ton.
• DK Eyewitness Mesopotamia: the kids love the graphics and the bite-sized bits of information.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Four Little Chicks

Our babies have been the main focus of our lives ever since we received them:

brand-new babies, still with a layer of paper towels on top of their wood shavings

I do make the girls wash their hands after touching the chicks, but I should probably also make them wash their faces!

Every day, Willow weighs each chick and writes what it's been doing that day in her chick journal.

I don't remember when I bought this postal scale, but we use the HECK out of it!

Our brooder is a clear plastic bin, lid cut out in the middle and chicken wire taped to it.

Inside are food, water (paper towels keep them cleaner from wood shavings), thermometer, a shade tent, and some greens and bugs to peck at.

This is Cluck.

 

Arrow

Fluffball

and Crow (or Peck--Syd can't decide which name she likes better)

   Syd loves the babies very much, obviously (as do I!), but this is the girl whom I really wanted to get chickens for:

My girl who keeps to herself, my girl who would rather read than play, my girl for whom comfort in her own skin and in the world at large is something that she has to work at, she has an affinity for animals. She's comfortable with them--


--she's feels free to be herself with them--

 --and they help her be kind and compassionate, to get out of her own head, and to connect:

Our babies are growing SO fast. I no longer wake up in the middle of the night to check that they're warm enough (Yes, I did that!), and they're just hitting the size that says to our three cats, combined with our body language, that these are not prey animals for them. Hopefully this weekend we'll build them their backyard coop, and let them start taking little day trips out there next week.

Because as much as I love love LOVE these babies, I'll also be pretty excited to have a hallway that does not contain a big chick brooder.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Altering a Softball Uniform and a Dinosaur-Themed Birthday Party

a tutorial for altering a too-big softball uniform

and a tutorial for the fruit and cheese dinosaurs that we served at Syd's seventh birthday party

At the party we also did this mini-watermelon dinosaur egg activity. The girls helped me and Matt paint mini watermelons to look like Easter eggs--

--and on the day of the party, I hid the giant dinosaur Easter eggs around our yard. There was one egg for each child at the party, and to begin the game I showed the children the one extra egg that we'd decorated so that they'd know what to look for, and told them to find one egg and then come back to the deck.

When all the children had returned with their egg I passed around a Sharpie so that they could label it to take home, and then Matt took out our example egg and asked them if they knew what a dinosaur egg looked like on the inside:

It was pretty cute to see the kids' faces, especially before he'd gotten the wedge cut out but after the red juice had started dripping off his hand.

Watermelon? Big hit:

Of course, there was even more food--

--some singing and a wish-- 

--and a walk over to the park to run the sugar off and open presents:

Although Syd was overwhelmed by the attention, she nevertheless claimed that it was the best birthday party ever.

And now she's seven!

Homeschool Biology: Horse Evolution on the Timeline

Our science right now consists of both horse biology and chicken biology--the kids are taking horseback riding lessons, and we have chicks!

It's mostly memory work stuff, these topics, because I still have my eye on starting an in-depth study of human biology later this summer, so the plan is to study classification, evolution, labeling of internal and external parts, life cycle, breeds, and stewardship for both creatures. Because horses and chicks are of special interest to the kids right now, their interest and engagement will aid their learning, while interacting with and caring for the actual creatures add depth and context and increase their capacity for taking in the material. But much of the actual content that they'll be exploring are actually foundational biology concepts that will build their overall knowledge base and enable me to add increasing depth and sophistication to their further studies.

Classification of horses made for a great research project (and how stoked were we when we finally learned what "odd-toed ungulate" means!), labeling is something that the kids work on every day as part of their memory work (their riding instructor also includes this, briefly, into their lessons), horse care is also covered during their lessons and through library books and videos, breed study is mostly still to come, although the kids have written reports about the horse breed that each rides during her lessons, life cycle is still to come (birthing videos on YouTube--yay!), and evolution was studied last week!

Our horse anatomy coloring book has a page on horse evolution, which the kids colored, cut out, and organized chronologically, then we added in a ton more modern horse ancestors using this online, interactive fossil map. I printed each ancestor off, then the kids cut out the images and important information and added each one to its proper place in the chronology:

I read out loud the info about each ancestor, we discussed how each one represented a change, and then it was downstairs to the big basement timeline, with stacks of horse ancestors, a pot of Mod Podge, and two foam paintbrushes.

It tortures me that our basement timeline isn't perfect--there's not enough room for everything (the lack of space in the Modern Age is critical), the layout of the epochs isn't even, and because it's so busy, it's too easy to accidentally place something in the incorrect decade, or even, in the prehistoric era, the incorrect millennium.

I don't know how you would fix that, though, without standardizing the entries beyond what would be fun for the kids. They like giant pictures, and entire coloring pages, and images printed from the internet, and large, messily-handwritten captions.

And so they glued up their links in the evolution of the horse more or less in the correct spots:

You can at least gather some facts from the messy timeline--horses come after the dinosaurs, and begin to overlap, towards this end of their evolution, with the beginnings of our record of human evolution. Much further down towards the present, we also record the horse's extinction in North America, and then its reintroduction.

And THAT leads to some interesting exploration of human history, and geography, and then leads pretty logically to breed study.

But first I think that we're going to watch those horse birthing videos on YouTube.

If at First You Don't Succeed...

On Recital Day this week, Will was ready to perform "Mary Had a Little Lamb"...nearly:

Take 1

Take 2

Take 3!

The kiddo seems really engaged with her music these days, happily practicing her lesson during our morning Memory Work time, and also goofing around with the recorder, which is sort of my personal hallmark of whether or not one of my kids enjoys something. This week she's learning the rest of the notes to make an entire octave (I print out these soprano recorder fingerings, and have Willow cut out the relevant ones to study and paste them into her school notebook), and then we'll have several other songs to learn before we move into the world of sharps and flats. 

And then, in a couple of months... violin?

DIY Dinosaur Birthday Party Invitations

It's birthday party season! We've got one dragon-themed ninth birthday party coming up in a do-able two months, and one dinosaur-themed seventh birthday party coming up in--gasp!--two days!!!

At this point, I should probably be concerned with cutesie games and activities and party favors, but what I'm REALLY concerned about is mowing the lawn, making a sign to warn people not to lean against the bathroom sink that is duct-taped to the wall, and...

Nope, that's about it. A lawn with grass that isn't a foot high and a sink that doesn't crash down on top of a kid. Those are my priorities.

Priorities or not, children do have to be informed that there is a party happening, to which their attendance is requested, so we did manage to get invitations made and distributed last week. The fact that this was accomplished by me unashamedly setting the task up as an assignment on a school day, well...

Eh, it is what it is. Sometimes you make birthday party invitations at school.

The invitations were postcards; Matt designed one half of one side to contain the party invitation--

--left the other half blank for the address, and on the flip side the girls each took half the postcards and drew a dinosaur scene on each one:

My Will is pretty studious these days, taking a lot of pleasure in intellect-driven pursuits. She's taken it upon herself to keep a daily journal of our chicks, for instance, and to weigh them every day, and when creating her postcard illustrations, she got out a dinosaur encyclopedia, because she knew exactly what dinosaurs she wanted to draw, and she wanted to get each one just right:

I've noticed that Will has lately become studious in other areas, too. She still throws the occasional fit about an assignment or chore and must be sent to bed for eight minutes, but she's taken complete charge of the daily welfare of our chicks, cleaning their water dish and freshening their bedding several times a day, unasked, sat through loads of sister dress rehearsals and recital business without fuss, and when I asked her this morning if she could be the one to help set up Sydney's birthday party with me this weekend (It's sort of a surprise party, so Matt's job is to keep Sydney out of the house that day), I had almost expected her to say no, or to ask if she could be out with Matt and Syd instead, but not only did she say yes right away, but she was excited at the prospect of helping with the food and decorations and set-up.

If this is what nine is going to be like, then I am all in!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Handmade Looms and a Rock Star Dress (and Four New Babies, Too)

a round-up of handmade looms crafted from upcycled materials

and a review of the Cool Water dress from Sew Pretty: T-Shirt Dresses

I messed up the distance between the upper black and white ruffle and the pink skulls ruffle--I'm not going to  try to fix it, but it did cause me to see that the dress with only two ruffles would be a pretty cool top. Mod to come:

In other news, I took a deep breath, gathered some supplies, put Matt to work with a box knife and plenty of duct tape, and accepted the generosity of a good friend in her gift of four of her recently-hatched chicks:

We can keep up to five hens in our yard, but really I only want two or three, so hopefully one or two, but not all four, of these babies will be boys, because I don't know how we'll stand to choose which ones to give back to my friend, otherwise.

Because we LOVE these chicks. LOVE. THEM. Especially Fluffball:

Fluffball is some kind of chicken genius, I swear. Willow is all the time catching potato bugs (I pay her a penny for each bug she picks out of my garden, payable upon the dollar) and dropping them into the chicks' brooder, and so far only Fluffball has figured out the utter awesomeness of these bugs. She'll run up right away and start grabbing them up, and then the other chicks will get excited because she's excited, so they'll chase her around with a bug in her mouth and try to get it from her, but in the rare instances that they actually do, they just stare at the bug and they're all, "What's the hell is THIS thing?!?", but in that time Fluffball has managed to grab another bug, which gets the chicks all excited because she's excited, so they'll chase her around with a bug in her mouth.

Fluffball can also roost on the rock that we've got in there for some chick enrichment, and she can jump off of your hand if you put it super low to the ground, and once Sydney had her outside of her brooder on the floor with her, and she saw an ant crawling by, and she ate it!

Of course, we love Arrow, Crow, and Cluck, too. But it's nice to know that they've got a chicken genius like Fluffball to show them what's what.