ancient china

As I have mentioned before... we're taking our own sweet time working our way through Story of the World Volume 1. This week we spent some time studying Ancient China.

We watched a couple of Netflix movies.

The first one was...

China - The Panda Adventure (IMAX)

This was had no real tie to Ancient China other than the movie was set in China. We had watched it years before when we studied China when we used Galloping the Globe. As soon as the kids heard we were studying China, they requested that I get this movie again. It's a good movie in the sense that it has amazing footage of the beauty of natural China and the rivers mentioned in Story of the World. The panda bears are pretty cute too (Clara's favorite part). But the basic story is that of a race between a woman (whose husband died in China while studying pandas) and a hunter set on killing pandas. One cub will go missing and the hunter kills the mother panda (Clara was traumatized... briefly). But in the end the woman adopts the remaining cub and takes it back to the US. Footage of the adorable cub cheered Clara up again.

The second movie we got was...

Ancient China: A Journey Back in Time (Lost Treasures of the Ancient World)

Hmmmm.... what to say about this one. It has good information... but, it was DULL! At least to me. I really wanted to like it, but I couldn't. The kids lasted all of the way through it but maybe that had more to do with the fact that they rarely watch TV and they weren't going to give up the opportunity easily than it did with actually liking the thing.

We didn't do so good with movies this go around but we did get some cool books at the library.

Two favorites were....

The Warlord's Puzzle
and
Grandfather Tang's Story

We started out by reading The Warlord's Puzzle. I mistakenly thought that our shapes tub had tangram pieces in it so I dumped them all out in the floor before I realized that it didn't. I ended up tracing the tangram pieces in the back of the book and cutting a set out for each child. They really enjoyed the book and constantly recite the boy's story about the fish in order to make the pieces into the tile again.

But, I have to say, that the favorite of the two books was Grandfather Tang's Story. The story was about two fox fairies who could change shape.

Here are the two foxes at the beginning of the book...
(side note: this book is great for two kids as there are two foxes who change shape... each child can be one of the characters and rearrange their tangram pieces to make the shape of the animal their fox changes into)

Here is Clara's fox changing into a squirrel (I think)....

Midway through the story, Clara remembered that we had tangrams in our Classic Tangoesgame.... so she got those out so they could use those instead....
Crazy thing is, that night while Clara was at swim, Alex and I walked to the thrift store nearby and found this....

The Fun with Tangrams Kit

We got it, two other math books and an I Spy computer game for $2.40 (you've got to love thrift stores!). It even had the punch out tangram pieces still in the book... however, we just used our plastic ones from the game again.

They've been playing with the book quite a bit.

Here's their favorite one so far....

... I'm not sure who exactly it is supposed to be (since it's just under the heading "faces") but the kids have decided that it looks like Abraham Lincoln and I couldn't agree more.

We read one other library book aloud... The Warlord's Messengers. The kids really enjoyed that book. To be technical, this book is set quite a while after the time period covered in SOTW but it was still a good read. We're going to read The Warlord's Alarmtomorrow.


I checked out a few other library books for the kids to choose from for free reading.

Here are those books:
The Jade Stone: A Chinese Folktale
The Emperor and the Kite
The Sons of the Dragon King: A Chinese Legend
See Inside an Ancient Chinese Town

growing back into picture books

I can't tell you how excited I am to be back in the picture book section of the library again! I LOVE the picture book section. I thought we had left it behind... Alex was now into chapter books and Clara had her readers.... our read alouds were chapter books now too.... we had no use for picture books.... or so I thought! Then I started reading more and more about the benefits of using "living books" in homeschooling and things started to change.

A few months back I blogged about how I was compiling a reading list for Clara each week and in those lists were several picture books. Well.... that idea snowballed. Not only did Clara read all of the books but so did Alex. So now I no longer make a reading list for Clara. I pick a topic (based on Story of the World, a science interest, season, holiday, upcoming trips... whatever) and collect a stack of picture books from the library on that particular subject.

The kids LOVE this! The main reason I no longer make a reading list for Clara is that she will select a stack of books from our library basket to read in bed each night completely on her own.... Alex does the same. Alex will still read his chapter books at bedtime, but will have a little picture book "appetizer" before diving into his main course :-)

Here's a partial stack of what we checked out this week...
Given that it's spring now... we have quite a few books on flowers and seeds.

Zinnia's Flower Garden

Looks like your typical picture book, right? Well... take a look inside...
There is all kinds of great information inside this colorful little book from the "kiddie" section! Parts of a flower... life cycle of a butterfly.... stages of germination... types of clouds... and so much more all along with the story of a girl and her garden. And to think I thought I had no use for picture books anymore!

Flip, Float, Fly!: Seeds on the Move

A beautifully illustrated book with simple text about the different methods of seed dispersal...

(please forgive the slightly out of focus photo above)

I thought the illustrations in this book were gorgeous....

A Seed Is Sleepy

It includes lots of great information as well.... my problem with it?

A lot of the text is in cursive...
Which poses a problem.... mainly for Clara.

Our next topic in Story of the World is Ancient India. So I visited the folktale section as well and picked up several retellings of Indian folktales...

Seven Blind Mice

I have no requirements in regards to the picture books. They're free to read them or not read them whenever they want. They don't think of them as "school" at all. I also have to try to not think of them as "school" too much or I tend to get upset when they don't choose to read a certain book (if it's a book I feel strongly about, I will commit to reading it during school time). However, they usually work their way through about 80% of what we bring home. They do oral narrations of most books without knowing it. Usually from me saying "oooh... that looks like a cool book... what's it about?". :-)

Another reason I love the picture book section... it's been a great way to get Clara to read more challenging text without forcing longer chapter books on her. She's ready for harder text... but she's not ready for a longer story that will take her several days to read. These books have more difficult words in them, but also have good picture clues and good definition clues in the text since they're written for a younger audience.

Anyway.... sorry about the long rambling post... I'm just had to share my excitement! :-)

Egyptian Art

The kids and I decided to take a little field trip yesterday. We always make several trips a year to the Art Institute and given that admission is free in February... we thought it would be a perfect destination yesterday.

We didn't have a whole lot of time.... just a couple of hours before we had to head to Clara's dance class, so we had to pick a few priorities to hit.

To go along with Story of the World Volume 1, we decided to visit the ancient Egypt section first...

Head of an Official...

Coffin and Mummy of Paankhenamun....Canopic Jar of Amunhotep, Chief Builder of Amun...
Statue of Osiris...
Mummy Head Cover...

No matter how many times we visit this exhibit, we find something new... or we've read something more so the items have even more meaning for us. I love that we have the opportunity to visit these items over and over.

I have more pics and more rambling to do but given that I have a cold that has decided to take up residence in my head... I'm going to save the rest for later and join the kids in the floor (they're working on their pet store!).

one more Egypt dvd...

I had forgotten about having this one in my Netflix queue until it showed up on Wednesday. We almost didn't watch it because we had watched several different documentaries about the pyramids already.... but the kids seemed interested in it so I put it in yesterday.

Building the Great Pyramid

I'm glad that I did. It was a completely different DVD than what we had previously watched. This was a fictionalized account of the life of one of the workers on the Great Pyramid. It followed him from the time when he was called from his small village into the service of the Pharaoh until the completion of the pyramid. Reviewers on Amazon appear to either love it or hate it. Perhaps those that hate it were expecting a more traditional documentary. That's what I was expecting... however, was very pleasantly surprised by this different view of the same information. The kids liked it too... of course, Alex more than Clara, but I wouldn't have expected anything different. :-)

I know what you mean, Angel... I tend to forget about Netflix too. Those other two movies I mentioned earlier this week had been sitting on our end table since before Christmas... sigh. I'm trying to get better about utilizing it... especially since the DVDs we've gotten from the library lately have been scratched to the point that they were unwatchable.

a couple of egypt dvds

We have watched a couple DVDs on Ancient Egypt lately. We got both of them from Netflix.

The first one we watched was...

Pyramid

This one was based on the book by the same name by David Macaulay. We had checked out the book from the library as well.

Alex really liked this movie. I was a little let down, but I think it was because I was expecting something different. I think we'll continue to get the movies from this series as we work our way through Story of the World.

The second one we watched was this one...

The History Channel Presents Egypt - Engineering an Empire

I thought this one was amazing. Alex and Clara both got into it... Alex especially. There was a lot about the "hows" and "whys" of the ancient Egyptian structures. It was amazing to see just how some of the things were constructed.

My only word of caution is that during the section on Queen Hatshepsut they document the queen's relationship with Senenmut by showing ancient lewd graffiti that had been found... they do blur out the worst parts.... but it was a subject I wasn't expecting to see in this program.

Anyway... I finally remembered to mail in our Netflix movies, so by the end of the week we'll have one more Egypt DVD to watch.

extra credit?

It's funny.... since we've adopted a new attitude in regards to school lately, "school" never seems to stop. It just becomes part of our lives.... a part that isn't packed up and put away for the weekend and after 3:00 on weekdays. It's amazing to witness.

So, back this past summer, I was telling a friend of mine that we were going to be working our way through The Story of the World Volume 1this year. Knowing Alex the way she does, she suggested that we get this book she had seen on Amazon....

The Art of the Catapult: Build Greek Ballistae, Roman Onagers, English Trebuchets, and More Ancient Artillery

It was a very good call! Alex loves this book! He has studied it over and over and has picked a project to start on with his dad. They went to the hardware store last weekend to get their supplies (Jeff said that they got some strange looks from the staff as they kept consulting the book as they selected their supplies). That was another thing that excited me about this book. I do so much of the school work with the kids and this was a cool way to get Jeff involved with what we're up to.

Anyway... while waiting for time to start the construction on their catapult.... Alex decided the he would attempt building a trebuchet out of Legos.

He had been working on it alone for a few days... constantly peppering us with questions about its construction. Finally on Sunday, he had the basic structure done and from there it became a several hour family project. It was so much fun lying in the floor together... testing, analyzing, rethinking, retesting, etc.

Here's Jeff getting ready to fire the trebuchet...
(yes, the ammo is an "enemy head" as Alex had read in the book... sigh)

Making some modifications...
Ready.... aim....
FIRE.....
Here are a couple of (poorly shot) videos of a couple of firing attempts...

one not so successful one...

and one successful one...


Please ignore the various color casts of the photos... I have color cast issues :-) And, I was also having video issues this morning so one video was uploaded via blogger and another via photobucket... let's hope they work!