This past week, I asked them each to choose the civilization that was their favorite and create a presentation about it.  They could choose to present their information any way they liked and we video taped them.

Mahayla created a poster with information about various aspects of the Ancient Greek lifestyle.  She made a discus, drew a wonderful picture of a horse and chariot, set up a book for a visual and dressed in a Greek fashion of the time.  She really took this project seriously and made a great presentation.  )  (Sorry for the dark pictures.  I keep saying we need a new camera and I really mean it!)

Caleb also created a poster, but his was mostly pictures he (we) found on the internet that he labeled.  He made a clay model of the Geat Wall of China, dressed in a robe and served us hot tea.  I thought it was excellent for his first-ever presentation like this.

I really liked doing an end of the unit project and I think the kids did, too.  I think we’ll make these part of each unit this year.  Here are a few pictures of the notebooks we worked on throughout the unit.

Next stop:  Space!

On top of the regular reading about Ancient Greece, map work, timelines and such, we did lots of hands-on activities, too.  My kids gain so much more from the “exciting stuff”.

The philosopher Aristotle is known as the father of the scientific method.  Thanks to JoAnn, we had a really fun and simple activity that taught the scientific method.

The Story of the World had a really fun sticker making project.  We colored Greek symbols, then made our own sticker solution to paint on the back of the symbols.  After it dried, all we had to do was lick and stick!

The kids made happy and sad drama masks and created their own play.

Math one day was spent finding patterns for square numbers, triangular numbers, oblong numbers, and gnomon.  My worksheets came from a Teacher Created Materials unit on Ancient Greece.  You can probably do a quick search on the web for some free worksheets.  I bought my book for a quarter at a homeschool sale.  I wouldn’t recommend buying it unless you can find it as cheap as I did.  Almost all the activities seemed to center around the gods and goddesses of Ancient Greece.  That’s not something I wanted our family to focus on.   But, I did find a few things worth adding to the unit, so my quarter wasn’t wasted! 

And we made Baklava.  Yummy!

The best part of the week was mummifying a Ken doll.  Thanks Jamin for the idea!  Go to her post here for a full set of directions.  We prepared herbed oils earlier in the week and made the mummies as our final project on Friday.

Any spice covered with oil.  Shake everyday for a week.

Our poor Pharaoh before he realized death was imminent.

The project really didn’t take that long.  What a memory!

We also enjoyed Sanyet Batates (which is basically a meat and potato stew) and unleavened bread.

To get in the real spirit of things, Mahayla dressed up in an Egyptian princess outfit.

Later, Mahayla came to me and said, “Look, Mom, Spider Man had a baby!”  I suppose Caleb decided dressing up looked like fun.  Hmmm….I don’t remember Spider Man in any of our Ancient Egyptian readings.