Tag Archives: Ancient History

History ~Captivity, Moses, the Exodus, and Judges

booksThe Imagination Station “Secret of the Princes Tomb” is set at the beginning of the Israelites Slavery in Egypt.

“Tirzah” follows a young Israelite during the Exodus from Egypt and is a great read!

“Hittite Warrior” is set during the times of the judges, we have not read this one yet.

I am going to be reading it to them during the summer most likely.

insideI liked the “Almighty Bible’s” version of Genesis so I bought their Exodus version after we finished Tirzah and had the boys read it as a review.

It has great illustrations and I like the fact that it has more of the bible verse telling the story instead of paraphrasing.

verses

actionbibleThis is the inside of the “Action Bible” it is a great bible to give your kids an overview of the whole bible but I do not like how much “interpretation” is going on.

We worked in some straight bible reading also.

Science has taken a little bit of a back seat the past couple of months but we did try to study deserts a bit to get a feel for what it would have been like to travel through.

alldriedupThe Magic School Bus has a book and episode called “Gets All Dried Up” that explains deserts really well.

ecomazeEcoMazes is a pretty interesting book.

ecomazebook

deserttoobfigureI bought a Safari Toob from Hobby Lobby and let the boys set up a little diorama.

They got the idea from the Magic School Bus.

playI actually waited to write this post so we could do this today.

I kept putting it off but writing a post about it pushed me to get it done.

labelI looked up the names of everything on the site for the Toob and had them label them.

labelsIt helped me to feel like they were actually learning something.

I do not know if they did or not but I feel better.

sun

biomeWe have not done any of the projects in this book but they have some really cool ones!

I would not mind owning this one.

We are actually done in a way with school.

We finished Friday.

That said, we are doing Math all summer.

I have decided to take a break from math this week and start up again Monday.

Anyone else doing some school work this summer?

That way I do not feel all alone…

The Trojan War, Homer, and Archaeology.

It has been a little while since I did a post on what we are learning about right now.

Not because we have stopped learning.

I was just being lazy…

shipsAfter the great success of re-enacting the Trojan War 2yrs ago, I decided to do it again.

I forgot I read to them from the “The Aeneid for boys and girls” by Alfred J. Church so I read “The Illiad for boys and girls” instead.

It was good but very long.

My voice was tired.

troyTroy looked a lot like a medieval castle, you didn’t know that?

Strange.

parisParis the trouble maker.

battleThe boys were acting out the book as I read.

There were too many pauses between battles though and the legos were so tempting…

We did not finish it.

booksIf I had it to do again, I would probably have just read from “Tales from the Odyssey” by Mary Pope Osborne (The author of the Magic Tree House Series).

My oldest actually read both of the books by himself!

I did not realize it until yesterday.

“The Trojan Horse The Fall of Troy” is a really good book to get a picture of what is going on.

insideThe inside looks like a comic book.

moviesWe have also been watching some documentaries about the Trojan War and Troy itself.

“In Search of the Trojan War” and “The Battle for Troy”, the first is really long and broken up into several parts but follows the man who found Troy, Heinrich Schliemann.

We did not finish the whole thing yet because we were watching it in the vehicle and got to our destination before it was done.

Apparently the boys got something from it though because when they brought up Heinrich Schliemann in the second video my oldest got really excited.

I have found that my boys really like knowing about things (My oldest still gets really excited when he see’s the Mona Lisa just because he read a book about it) so if I introduce a subject with an easy introduction first they are more receptive to the informative stuff.

They feel like they know those people and want to hear more about them.

showandtellsThese are some of the books we got for Archaeology.

We only read “The Magic School Bus Shows and Tells” the other was just too dry.

There is a Magic School Bus episode by the same name also.

digforcluesThis book has been my favorite introduction to Archaeology so far.

Look what happened the first time we used it three years ago!

I had found a really interesting looking online game about Archaeology and was so excited for the boys to check it out.

It did not have a way to pin it to Pinterest so I just tried to keep the site open.

Yep, I lost it and can’t find it.

So frustrating!

Here is a list of games someone else put together that you can check out though.

If you know of a site that has an “Amy Archaeologist” can you let me know?

Thanks!

History~Stonehenge

Since I am teaching history via a timeline, we learned about Stonehenge right after the Sumerian Civilization.

buildersFor most of the study we just used “Decoding Stonehenge” on Netflix.

We had tried to watch this a couple years ago but this time the boys seemed to enjoy it better.

It has a lot of re-enactments of what they think took place at Stonehenge.

Whenever I think a movie might be a little bit too much for them I always make popcorn.

Popcorn always makes them sit still longer!

batmanThey made a model of Stonehenge with the Jenga blocks.

This really helped them remember what Stonehenge was!

We also found a good article on kidsdiscover.com.

It had a quiz at the end that the boys really liked doing.

I have just recently realized they love online quizzes!

stonehengeLego men of course needed to be added to our Stonehenge model…

solsticeSince the video we watched talked a lot about Solstice, I took the opportunity to study it.

These books, “The Shortest Day, The Longest Day, and Arctic Lights Arctic Nights” were really good!

I got all three at our local library!

I also found some really good information and videos about the Solstice at the Teacher Vision Website.

My only regret was not learning all of this during a Solstice!

Maybe we will have to look into it again in June when the Summer Solstice takes place.