Our Fun Educational Parties

Last fall we began hosting a history party once a month for our Ancient World studies.  (Loosely) following the outline of the Story of the World - Volume One we decided to celebrate and learn about different periods of ancient history and their locations by joining with some other families and playing games of the place/period, making crafts or doing activities, and eating food.  It's been monstrous fun.  A lot of work, mind you, but a lot of fun, too.  So far we have done:

Archeology - Our introductory party, to help introduce the children to the history of the ancient world the way archeologists learn about it.  For this party we set up a dig for the kids, gridding the sand at the park with string and burying bones, dinosaur eggs, and pottery shards for them to find.  One lucky kid even found a coin!  Then we made our own aboriginal hand print paintings by spitting kool-aid over our hands.  We ate food that we had to 'dig', like 7 layer dip.  It was a favorite party: mine still talk about it sometimes.

Ancient Egypt - Aurora dressed like an Egyptian princess and we made Egyptian necklaces out of paper plates, painting them in jewel colors.  We made our own little mummies using egg cartons as the sarcophogus and little cardboard people as our base to wrap in strips of white cloth.  The food wasn't as much of a hit, you can imagine, with figs and dates for the kids to try. 

Ancient China - The children learned how to play the game Go and they each tried their hand at Chinese calligraphy.  I served them quinoa with molasses, rice and stir fried vegetables and rice sticks.  There weren't any leftovers.  :-P

The First Thanksgiving - To break it up (and also to fill in enough months) and go along with our overview of American history (it's first grade; overviews are great!) we celebrated the First Thanksgiving in part by eating succotash and learning Five Men's Morris. 

Ancient America - We didn't want to overlook the ancient Americans!  We deciphered Native heirogyphs, made our own totem poles, and even ran the gauntlet (whilst being pelted with mini marshmallows)!  By this time I couldn't find any more authentic native recipes from the time period so we celebrated with a feast of Navajo Tacos (the kids weren't complaining!), everyone bringing a part to share.

Ancient Greece - Our last party was about ancient Greece so I decided it would be fun to have an authentic Olympic Games for the children to compete in, minus the naked wrestling, of course.  We had two distance races, standing jump, long jump, javelin toss and discus throw.  Then we made laurel wreaths for our heads.  The athletes feasted this time on some great Greek food: spanakopita, baklava, rice pilaf, pita & hummus and olives with grape juice to wash it all down.

Monday is our celebration of the Revolutionary War time period and I need to do some hurried research to fill in enough appropriate games, crafts and food for the eager children. 

Like I said: fun, but a lot of work!

Spinning Heads

Do you realize how many ways there are of learning the exact same material? And how many different people and companies have come out with books and other things to help learn that material? It is seriously enough to make one's head spin! Just when I think I have things pretty figured out with what I want to use, what I want the girls to learn, and how I am going to apply all of the methods I've read about...I read again and discover that there are yet more things to look at! This last week I found out about some more people with LDS curricula. Hmm...ever so tempting. Just wish I could look at everything and see which ones will work best for our family before I save the money and buy some of these!

Part of the problem comes with my being too ambitious. They must learn everything, and learn it NOW!

Yesterday Aurora developed a rather sudden interest in karate and has been pestering me to learn it for school. Couldn't make me happier, I can tell you! I have been dying to teach her some TaeKwon-Do, and for her to have an interest in it will make it that much easier.

Today for school we made a book. This came about because yesterday Aurora decided to write one. She cut up pieces of paper (all sizes, all small) and would draw a picture on it, then come to me and ask me to write down what she wanted to say for that page. Turned out the story was about a ballet and all the different people coming onto the stage. Very well thought-out for a five year-old. I was impressed. So today I thought we'd make an official book to put it in. Then we had company for awhile, whilst I babysat for a neighbor and ended up making a book for each of them, writing new stories. This is when I became really impressed with Rora. She drew pictures and narrated to me the story of "The Nutcracker", which I diligently wrote down for her. The neighbor girl's story was much shorter (Red Riding Hood climbed a mountain and then went to a party with Clara from Rora's story). After the neighbors left, I made a book for Rora's first book and we mounted all her little pages on construction paper within it. While I was cutting out the construction paper, though, Rora was hard at work on another piece of paper, drawing the binding for a hardcover book, then insisted that I put that as the cover for her book, so we had to mount that inside the binding of our little paper book. It was so cute and she was so proud!

It's moments like that which make the head spinning worth it.

How Early is Too Early?

You might think this question is only about the twins, who have decided to start waking up earlier and earlier. It's definitely harder to train two that 5:30 or 6:00 is too early for wee little girls to be awake than it was just one. Granted, I am really tired. Constantly. But the question is only partly about that. It is also about Aurora. When should I teach her certain things, and do I want to do too much too early? Goodness knows, I don't want to push her and turn her off learning. I also don't want to stick her on a conveyor belt of my own making. But I do expect a lot from my children and want to give them the best education possible, in academics, as well as in spirituality and in life.

The last month has involved my freaking out. Considerably freaking out. I think it would behoove me to sit down and calm down, praying for a few more weeks before taking a drastic measure and sticking Rora in a charter school (I've looked at around twenty in the last two weeks) just so I stop freaking out. The best advice I have received about this is that Rora is only just five and home schooling is supposed to be fun, so CALM DOWN! It is true. There are so many fun ways to learn those things that are important to learn. And, with the Culture Passes from the Library, we will have many, many fieldtrips to remember that learning is fun.

And I can always try making black-out curtains for the twins' room to fool them into thinking it's night time.