CtG Week 4 - pyramids, LOTS of science, kid blogs, and an epic battle

Here are a few highlights from our week...

Art

The Upper and Lower Egyptian crowns. I wish there was a template somewhere for these, but after some trial and error, we got them to work.

History

This week, the kids have been learning about Upper and Lower Egypt. They even got the chance to reenact the battle where King Menes united the kingdoms.

A and J only agreed to having it recorded if she could wear her Cleopatra outfit and he could use star wars sabers.

The kids wanted to swap places and reenact the battle again.



Science
The kids have been waiting to dig into their archaeology pyramid boxes for months now. We picked these up when our local teacher supply store was going out of business. We got an excellent deal on them :)

$30 regularly...on sale for $12!!!

Looking over the tools: brush, chisel, hammer, sponge, safety glasses, pic

They had to solve the hieroglyphic puzzle around the pyramid to find the secret entrance

Now they've found the right area; they must chisel away to unlock the pyramid

Beginning to uncover the treasures hidden inside

Same here

The artifacts: we'll learn more about these as we get to them in MFW 

More Science

The kids put some models together to figure out why the pyramids were built the way they were

The square structures kept falling apart

The triangles were much sturdier

Extras

In honor of the start of our Egypt study, we had yummy mummy pizza for lunch. Ours didn't turn out near as pretty as the one in this link, but it ate just the same. I remembered to take a picture before, but not after :( The kids had already half eaten them by the time I thought about it. They were a hit!

Kid Blog!!!! If your kids really don't care much for writing or doing journal entries...I highly suggest this. My mother-in-law told me about it a while back, but I am just now getting around the setting it up. It was an instant hit with both of my kiddos! Its name is self explanatory - it's a FREE blog for kids. It is safe, fairly easy to use (very similar to blogger) and you can even set it up to where only certain people can have a code to visit it. You just set up 1 teacher account and however many student accounts you want under that. Each of my kids have one. They even have to submit their stories and comments for my approval (if you want that option activated). I want to teach them to be safe online, so I still had them use code names and told them never to reveal personal information like addresses, names, etc... I am trying to clean my blog up to do the same :-/

 I sent their blog and access to it to multiple family members. They can comment and the kids can comment back. They love that part! They have been enjoying it and writing doesn't seem like so much of a chore anymore :-] They actually look forward to posting little blips and pics of what they are doing each week.


Yom Kippur 

We slacked a little on this feast :( We blew the shofars each day and talked about the meaning of Yom Kippur and about fasting (and I did fast for breakfast Sunday morning), but that was pretty much it.

This post has been linked up with Discover Their Gifts