Ancient China and Africa: SOTW

We had taken a break from SOTW since we changed gears last year and began the great lessons.  But D always asks for SOTW as she loves the stories and the activities!  Here are some of what we did when we covered Ancient China and Ancient Africa.

Chinese Ming Bowl

Here D is painting her Chinese Ming Bowl.  She made it using air dry clay and a kitchen bowl for mould.

The finished bowl!

 African Paper Beads Necklace

Here D is tracing and cutting triangles on the back of a scrapbook paper for her beads.  We should have used a smaller  triangle though!

The paper triangle rolled up and glued.

All threaded and ready to be worn!

African Hand Art

We do a lot of henna based mehendi at home, so we decided to do the hand art on paper and make a garland instead.

The hands we traced using construction paper.

We used sharpies to make the designs.

Canopic Jars and the Sarcophagus

We used the instructions in this book to make a Canopic jar.  We used Crayola Air Dry Clay to make it.  D made the body and lid of the jar and I had to help her make and paint the details of the Baboon Face.

But there was one problem with this, it was big enough not to fit our mummy's organs but the whole mummy itself! So we ended up making two tiny Canopic Jars.

D formed the shapes and I had to mold in the details.  Then we painted it and D asked me to fill in the details.

For the Sarcophagus, we decided to settle on a shoe box and the kids painted it red and golden.

Here is our mummy in its final resting place!  We even had an "Opening of the Mouth" ceremony!  We placed the mummy first in a coffin that we had recently purchased at a museum and the rest of the contents along with it!

We had an awesome learning experience with it.  In fact this topic led to discussion about the various ceremonies different cultures/religions follow and how it is done in Hinduism.  I need to search a few books on that topic for D to read at her level!

Things for the Mummy's Afterlife

As mentioned in this post, D wanted to make some items to put in the sarcophagus so that her little mummy would be comfortable in the afterlife.  The first thing she wanted to make was this boat that it could use to sail to afterlife.

She also made this "Scroll of the Dead" and "Sword".

Then she wanted to make some pottery.  We used Air-Dry Clay to make these.  I had to help her with shaping these as she wanted and she did the painting.  I filled in the details once she was done painting the base.

I highly recommend these two books before beginning this project.  These highly influenced her imagination and the whole process was led by D.

Mummy making

For our Chapter on Egypt in the SOTW, we wanted to make mummies.  Making a chicken mummy is out of the question for us as I am a vegetarian!  So we settled for the next best thing by mummifying one of the little dolls that we seem to have a million of.  I let D decide which one she wanted to mummify and we started the process.

The doll she decided upon, undressed ready for action!

Here is the setup that waiting for the kids that afternoon.  The linen strips are from an old towel.  The small plate has some wet linen to clean the body.

They took turns preparing the body.

Then we started wrapping the body, by then M had lost interest and wandered off!

Here is the finished mummy.  I had to help tie a knot to secure the linen.

We followed this up by making some items that D thought were need to be placed in the sarcophagus with the mummy and of course the sarcophagus! But that is for another post!

Pharaoh's Crown

As part of the chapter on Egypt, we made the Pharaoh's crown.  We own this Ancient Egypt book and it has lovely pictures and easy to read texts about Egypt.  As a bonus there are also little crafts you can do on various things from making crowns, to pyramids to all kind of things!  This book is D's favorite and you can often find her sitting in a quiet corner reading through this book.

Anyway here are our crowns.  we used red and white cardstock, eyeballed the sizes and used tape to hold everything together.  We used gold acrylic paints to make the snake heads.  I attached an elastic band to keep it secure while wearing it.

This has been used in various dress up and role play activities!

Cave Painting

As mentioned in this post, we started Story of the World: Volume 1 this summer.  D enjoys the story form of learning history and the bonus is that we love to do fun activities with each chapter.  We are taking time with each chapter and doing a lot of activities to make things memorable.  I am planning to post all our activities and also have a separate tab available dedicated to only the SOTW activities.

For today here is the cave painting that we did.  I try to include my little one (2 1/2) also in our activities.  

D wanted to have a draft of what she was going to paint on a piece of paper!  Though her final painting looked nothing like her draft!

D's draft.  You can see daddy hunting an animal, D doing a cave painting, M sleeping in a tent and mommy next to the tent!

We taped a crumpled and cut out grocery bag to a table.

M is attempting her painting!