Last week we moved away from Ancient Egypt (a post about 5 or 6 back if you missed it) and moved north up the Mediterranean to the island of Crete. In case you were wondering, yes, it is very hard to find children's books about ancient Crete. We ended up not spending so much time on the history of Crete itself, although we did look at the Palace at Knosses, their pottery, etc. Instead, we read some Greek myths relating to Crete. One day we read about Daedalus and Icarus, which is maybe my favorite, despite the horrible ending. I checked out two different versions of the story at the library so we could compare and talk about why the stories differed. And on a different day we talk about King Minos and the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. The Daedalus story and the Theseus story are connected in the middle so that is fun to have the same characters and plots in each. The Minotaur story, however, is also really sad. But we did learn something interesting. In ancient Crete their frescoes have many images of bulls and a double axe. The double ax was called a Labyr - the plural of which is Labyrinth. Since the palace of Knosses was so extremely huge, much bigger than any other building travelers at the time would have seen, people probably often got lost inside. Also, the Minoan's (the people of Crete) had an interesting sport with highly training young men and women doing acrobatics on a raging bull. Put all of those facts together and mix in a couple of thousand years and you can see how you might end up with a story of a labyrinth under the Palace of Knosses that housed the Minotaur, a great bull headed beast to whom 14 young boys and girls were sacrificed every 7 years.
Anyway.
It would have been fun to craft some wings on the Daedalus day or make a maze on the Minotaur day, but we didn't. We did, however, make our own frescoes, and that was difficult enough. The book we were reading said you could just use plaster of paris and water colors, but our paints continued to soak through the plaster even 3 days after and so the colors faded and now our frescoes just look kind of like a big blur of pastels. In any case, the kids have somewhat of an appreciation for how hard it would be to have to paint all the frescoes in that huge palace! No room for error at all and you have to work really fast before all the plaster dries. Abigail made some smiley faces and Joshua painted Odysseus' ship. (Sidenote: Derek just finished reading "The Odyssey" to the kids and Joshua loved it! Now my task is to find a kid friendly version of the Illiad or the Aeneid. I don't think I've ever actually read either of those.) This first photo is Joshua waiting for his plaster to mostly dry. It has to be dry enough to paint on, but wet enough to still be damp. We may not have waited long enough, but it was taking FOREVER!
The following is Odysseus's boat - Odysseus is poking his head from the right crying to his crew, "Row for your lives!!" as the Scylla, a six headed monster (only one head shown here) attacks.
We took a break from learning about an animal group this week to appreciate the fall colors and learn a little about trees. I have always thought it would be fun to be able to take the leaves from trees in your neighborhood and sit down and be able to identity and label them all... and I still think that would be fun if I only had 1 or 2 children instead of 4. Instead, we took a trip to Bridal Veil falls - see previous post - and admired the trees and picked a bunch of fall leaves. We read multiple books about trees and learned a lot of neat facts. The colors of the leaves change because the dry weather (and there has to be at least one other factor, I am sure) trigger the chlorophyll in the chloroplasts to die - The chlorophyll is the green part. The trees do this to conserve water in preparation for the dry/winter season. We made a box book of our favorite tree facts and chose five of our favorite fall leaves to glue to the back side. Also, while the middle kids (Abby and Lukas) were at music class on Wednesday, Joshua rode his bike around while I took Kaleb in the stroller and we looked at all the trees in our neighborhood. I quizzed Joshua on which ones were deciduous and which were coniferous and every now and then he would comment on the shape of the tree's crown. We are kind of nerdy - but efficient - P.E. and science at the same time. Woohoo homeschool!
Anyway.
It would have been fun to craft some wings on the Daedalus day or make a maze on the Minotaur day, but we didn't. We did, however, make our own frescoes, and that was difficult enough. The book we were reading said you could just use plaster of paris and water colors, but our paints continued to soak through the plaster even 3 days after and so the colors faded and now our frescoes just look kind of like a big blur of pastels. In any case, the kids have somewhat of an appreciation for how hard it would be to have to paint all the frescoes in that huge palace! No room for error at all and you have to work really fast before all the plaster dries. Abigail made some smiley faces and Joshua painted Odysseus' ship. (Sidenote: Derek just finished reading "The Odyssey" to the kids and Joshua loved it! Now my task is to find a kid friendly version of the Illiad or the Aeneid. I don't think I've ever actually read either of those.) This first photo is Joshua waiting for his plaster to mostly dry. It has to be dry enough to paint on, but wet enough to still be damp. We may not have waited long enough, but it was taking FOREVER!
We took a break from learning about an animal group this week to appreciate the fall colors and learn a little about trees. I have always thought it would be fun to be able to take the leaves from trees in your neighborhood and sit down and be able to identity and label them all... and I still think that would be fun if I only had 1 or 2 children instead of 4. Instead, we took a trip to Bridal Veil falls - see previous post - and admired the trees and picked a bunch of fall leaves. We read multiple books about trees and learned a lot of neat facts. The colors of the leaves change because the dry weather (and there has to be at least one other factor, I am sure) trigger the chlorophyll in the chloroplasts to die - The chlorophyll is the green part. The trees do this to conserve water in preparation for the dry/winter season. We made a box book of our favorite tree facts and chose five of our favorite fall leaves to glue to the back side. Also, while the middle kids (Abby and Lukas) were at music class on Wednesday, Joshua rode his bike around while I took Kaleb in the stroller and we looked at all the trees in our neighborhood. I quizzed Joshua on which ones were deciduous and which were coniferous and every now and then he would comment on the shape of the tree's crown. We are kind of nerdy - but efficient - P.E. and science at the same time. Woohoo homeschool!
Love the box-book!
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