Satori Smiles » SOTW 1: Ancient Times

SOTW: Middle Kingdom of Egypt

Angela — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:34:58 +0000

I’ve been letting our history lessons slide if I’m not prepared to do the activities, so I’ve decided to just keep going with the readings and do a bunch of the activities in one day when we’re more prepared. For SOTW’s Middle Kingdom of Egypt we already made our Hyksos chariot, but this week we re-read it as a review and did a few more activities. Satori got a kick out of mom continually having to refer to the pronunciation chart in the back of the book to pronounce Amenemhet, Ahmose, Tutunkhamen, Thutmose, Hatshepsut. Satori of course had it all memorized the first time, she’s got such a good memory. A day later, I heard her murmuring some of these hard Egyptian names when playing with her Barbies.

For this lesson, I thought I’d use the whiteboard to “act-draw” the lesson out, mostly to help me retain it all. It actually turned out fun and Satori loved it! This board illustrated the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, how Amenemhet looked to Nubia to expand, bringing gold and other items like monkeys into Egypt. The Egyptians renamed Nubia Kush. Later, Nubians became an important part of Egypt, such as Queen Tiye (Tie-ee). Then the Hyksos came down with their new weapons and chariots, ruled for Egypt 100 years, until Ahmose drove them out.

Some of the activities we did included making golden bracelets.

For this craft, I used a Scott toilet paper roll (they don’t leave toilet paper residue), cut it in half, and then cut lengthwise. Painted it in gold and let dry.

Then Satori put them on her little arms.

Also a suggested activity was burning incense. Might as well make a lesson multi-sensory!

Anyway, from now on, we will be on schedule for our SOTW history lessons, even if we go for several weeks simply reading the book and doing the Activity Guide coloring pages/maps. We can easily review with audio. The fun crafts and activities won’t hold us up any longer!

SOTW: Gods of Ancient Egypt I have a feeling Story of the World is going...
Ancient Egypt Family Craft Night It was Family Craft Night again at Satori’s house! Tonight...
SOTW Lesson plans I’ve uploaded our SOTW Lesson Plans on my Google Docs...

Ancient Africa – Fried Plantains

Angela — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 01:19:48 +0000

Last summer we had the pleasure to host a guest from South Africa for the weekend. Every morning he made himself fried bananas! We never tried them… until today. Our SOTW Ancient Africa activities included a lot of recipes to try, and since we’re vegetarians, we decided to go with an easy one.

This was our first time eating a plantain. It looked a little overripe, but it worked out fine.

They were more challenging to peel than a normal banana, so I cut it in three pieces and went from there. Then I sliced them into 1/4″ slices. We don’t fry things much, so all I had to fry them in was coconut butter. About a minute on each side.

I also wanted to make the Mango Rice, but I forgot to pick up mangoes. So we just had the Fried Plantains with white rice. And this was our dinner tonight! (A typical dinner for us lately is brown rice and some sort of bean, so this wasn’t that unusual.)

They were delicious!!

GeoPuzzle: Africa and the Middle East Since we’re starting our history lessons and the first parts...
Ancient China – Make a Ming Bowl This is the second project we’ve done to go with...
SOTW: Gods of Ancient Egypt I have a feeling Story of the World is going...

SOTW Family Craft: Egyptian Horse and Chariot

Angela — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 01:56:36 +0000

This afternoon while David was preparing his hot chocolate, he started joking around and proclaimed he wanted to go to Jo-Anns and get some materials to do some crafts. In the blink of an eye, I set out craft materials for a SOTW project Satori and I were going to do this week. He eased into the craft and we turned it into a family craft night!

Satori is now studying the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and after reading “The Hyksos Invade Egypt”, we learned that the Egyptians grew weak and were invaded by the Hyksos. The Hyksos were warrior nomads who easily conquered Egypt with their superior weapons and a light-weight horse-drawn chariot. Eventually the Egyptians copied these tools of warfare and drove the Hyksos out using their own technology!

Here’s a few drawings of Egyptian chariots and weapons. For the parents wanting to learn more about this time, here’s =a 7.5 page PDF document about these chariots and the Hyksos.

This craft was much easier to do than I anticipated. It was one of our first experiences using a hot glue gun, sorry David for not warning you how hot that glue was going to be! Our chariot is a bit bigger than the ones pictured above, but it served its purpose. Our Egyptian warrior was proudly carried around in it.

Just for giggles, Satori also wanted me to shoot a picture of our Egyptian fighting off a Dimetrodon. She knew the Dimetrodon was from prehistoric Permian period and this scene could never have taken place!

Ancient Egypt Family Craft Night It was Family Craft Night again at Satori’s house! Tonight...
Family Craft Night: Ancient Writings Following the suggested activities in our Story of the World...
SOTW: Our Nile River reeds are growing SOTW Chapter 2 introduces us to the Egyptians, and the...

Ancient China – Make a Ming Bowl

Angela — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 22:17:01 +0000

This is the second project we’ve done to go with the Story of the World Chapter 10 – The Far East: Ancient China. We made blue and white Ming Bowls out of clay, painted them with blue designs and then glazed with glue.

We’ve been using the soft Crayola Model Magic modeling material for projects involving clay as it’s so soft and easy to form for small hands. Satori formed her bowl over existing little bowls so we got a bowl shape.

We dried them for 24 hours.

To start the painting, Mama printed out some Ming Bowl examples from Google Images, got our blue paint ready, and our dry white bowls.

Satori decided to paint flowers on her bowl. Mama tried painting a dragon, bird, flowers and other designs. After the blue paint dried, we then glazed it over with a formula of 2 parts glue to 1 part water.

Our finished bowls! We did have rice for lunch, now I wish we would have served it up in our new Ming bowls, perfect size for rice.

After googling “sotw ming bowl”, I found this website who approached the Ming Bowl project in a different way. Check out Shady Bayou Academy if you want more fancy, longer-lasting Ming plates!

Ancient Egypt Family Craft Night It was Family Craft Night again at Satori’s house! Tonight...
Family Craft Night: Ancient Writings Following the suggested activities in our Story of the World...
“The Aquarium” painting by Satori After we whizzed through the “f” section in Explode the...

Making Chinese Pictograms

Angela — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 02:21:34 +0000

We covered our Ancient China lesson months ago, but I really wanted to do projects for each Story of the World lesson, so this project is a bit late.

This is the pictogram for “house”, as described in our Story of the World text.

Satori built a complex pictogram that means “village”. This page turned out to be more of a painting of a village rather than a word symbol.

Here is Satori’s pictogram for “mountains”.

Be sure to check out this neat Chinese Pictogram worksheet for more fun!

Ancient China – Make a Ming Bowl This is the second project we’ve done to go with...
Making Mummies One of Story of the World’s most famous activities is...
Making Your Own Timeline Figures with Dymo Label I love organizing and labeling things. You can get a...