SOTW: Chapter 19 The Early Greeks

We are doing chapter 19 in The Story of the World and I am not too excited about the projects for this chapter. We did the map work, both coloring pages, and I found this short 4 minute video about the Mycenaeans from Rick Steves. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELH_5Do-VZI

Story of the World, Chapter 16: Lego Siege Tower

We completed chapter 16, "The Return of Assyria" in The Story of the World. We both enjoyed it but I knew the activity would be the big hit! W loves Legos...like OBSESSED, so I knew he would want to make the Lego siege tower which is an activity in the activity book. Here are some pictures of what he made...

 

The side view. He changed the actual battering ram component a few times.

 

Just look at those faces. Clearly ready for combat. I love the spear with the flame. He came up with that all on his own because he only had one bow and arrow (something I can't believe for a child who has 10,000+ *literally* Legos, but whatever).

 

After the first few attempts broke the battering ram we decided to follow the advice in the book and go for a crack in the wall. It worked much better and there was a lot less damage to our battering ram. As you can see, he also added a cannon. Not a historically accurate weapon but I am sure the Assyrians would have loved to have them!

SOTW: Phoenician Traders

Today we stared chapter 15 of The Story of the World. If you don't know about SOTW, it is a chronological story of the world, with the first volume (1 of 4) starting with the nomads who roamed the fertile crescent and ending with the fall of Rome. We absolutely love this book and it has made history our favorite subject. This chapter is about Phoenician traders. It talks about how they were the best sailors of their time and how they were amazing glass makers. SOTW also has an accompanying activity book which I highly recommend. It really helps kids (and adults) to visualize the lessons and they seem to stick better. We did a project where we made "glass" with some wax paper, crayon shavings (primary colors, which went well with our primary colors lesson from last week), some string (apparently the Phoenicians were famous for adding string to their glass), and some newspaper.

 

First step was to evenly distribute the crayon shavings, leaving a little bit of space around the outside.

 

We had to use some paper bags which worked fine. I also used a towel on top because ironing paper just seems a little dangerous to me ;)

 We chose to make a vase shape since some of the images we looked up online were of beautiful glass vases. The mixing of the primary colors was really neat and we sat for awhile and picked out all of the different colors and discussed which colors mixed to make them. We also watched this YouTube video (subtitled) about people still making glass in the Phoenician style.