When we studied pyramids, we read several books about how pyramids were built. The children wrote a paragraph or two about pyramids to add to their Ancient Egypt notebooks. While the blocks were out, the kids decided to build a step pyramid. Then the kids all insisted that they wanted to make sugar cube pyramids.
I had never bought sugar cubes before. I can’t believe I spent $8 for two boxes of sugar cubes. I asked my kids how badly they wanted to make pyramids out of sugar cubes, and they said, “Very badly,” which is why I got them.
The children glued their pyramids together with Elmer’s glue, but the pyramids didn’t stay together. The smaller ones stayed stuck together, but the larger the pyramid, the more it fell apart. Before it was a complete catastrophe, I poured sand over the sugar cube pyramids, and they looked much more dramatic and beautiful.
The best way to do leaf rubbings is to use oil pastel crayons. They are like creamy crayons, and the rubbings come out much nicer than ordinary crayons. I always cut the paper in half so the children can do one leaf per page, labeling each kind of leaf after doing the rubbing.
Always choose darker colors for the crayons; the lighter colors don’t provide enough contrast. Hold the crayon sideways, parallel to the paper. In other words, use the side of the crayon. Make sure to get good coverage so that you can see the veins of the leaf. Pay attention to the edges of the leaf, to make sure the shape of the leaf is clear.
You can hole-punch the pages and make a book out of the leaf rubbings by adding a construction paper cover and binding it with yarn.
Another variation is to grab some black paper and do a leaf rubbing with a lighter-colored crayon. Yellow, light green, or light orange work well. The leaf rubbings come out looking gorgeous. And if you shine a black light on it, it will glow in the dark!
Have you ever thought of making an ice cream ant? This is a great way to teach your children about insects.
I started by scooping out three vanilla ice cream scoops for the three parts of the body: head, thorax, and abdomen. The children stabbed in six pretzel sticks for legs, all coming out of the thorax, of course. Two more pretzels were poked into the head for antennae. (You had to almost hold on to the ice cream to jab those pretzels in!) I quickly poured a chocolate magic hardening shell on top, for the exoskeleton. I was originally going to use almond bark, which I’ve discovered, is great for making frozen chocolate bananas. But when I tried it, the chocolate ice cream ant looked like a giant had stepped on it! It was a mess. It was probably due to the boiling hot chocolate being poured on ice cream.
My husband said there was an easier way, and off he went to the grocery store. He found the magic shell stuff around the place where you find Hershey’s syrup. I wish I had memorized the name of the thing, but it has the word “magic” in it, and “hardens” was another key word. It might have been Smuckers.
Anyway, since there are six people in our family, we made two ants, and each person ate an ant segment. All my kids fought over the thorax, for some odd reason, maybe because they wanted to get more pretzels. It was a fun project. If you decide to do this project with your kids, just remember not to use almond bark, or you’ll get a big gooey mess. I’ve included a photo so that you can point and laugh.
What does a typical homeschool day look like? This video shows you exactly what we did during one school day while doing a unit study on Ancient Egypt.
First thing in the morning, the kids wake up and start doing their math. My oldest two kids switched from Saxon to Teaching Textbooks. That has cut their time in half because they do a workbook, so they don’t have to write out all of their math problems. Plus, it’s self-correcting. It’s expensive, though.
They’re in separate rooms to work on their math. My younger two children are working on Horizon math. They usually get their math done before breakfast, which is really nice.
As you can see, we use headphones so that if one of our kids wakes up earlier than the others, it doesn’t affect the other kids waking up.
Here we are eating breakfast. We listen to Scripture while we’re eating breakfast. (Audio of the book of Exodus playing in the background, which relates to our unit study on Ancient Egypt.)
Here’s my 5-year-old. She’s reading from a McGuffey book. My 7-year-old and my 5-year-old read to me after they finish their math and after they eat breakfast (with Bible).
My 8-year-old son is practicing guitar.
So we’ve done math first thing in the morning. Then we did Bible as we were eating breakfast. Then we did reading. Now we have our writing. This is my 5-year-old’s writing about mummies after studying mummies for about a week and doing a lot of hands-on activities about mummies. And this is my 7-year-old’s writing about mummies. My 8-year-old hasn’t decorated his page yet. This is from our notebooks on Ancient Egypt, which the kids were able to decorate. We also have my 10-year-old, who has just finished putting on some stickers to write the title of his writing assignment about mummies. He has decorated his page. So he’s just finished with his writing assignment.
We just read from Story of the World and Pyramid by David Macauley. We’ve also been talking about tombs, and now we’re making some treasure. We have a treasure chest, and in that treasure chest, we are going to put some treasure. We made some treasure out of clay, and we are painting it with metallic colors now. Those treasures we’ll end up putting in the treasure chest. We looked at the treasure of King Tut and his tomb. The pharaohs had tombs that were made for them as well as pyramids. So we’re changing our treasure chest into an Egyptian treasure chest because it looked just like the treasures we saw in the book about King Tut. Look at all the lovely treasures in King Tut’s tomb. We are thinking about what we want to put into our treasure chest. That is our history class today. I read the lesson while the kids are eating lunch so that it’s nice and quiet.
During their free time, my kids often work on their electronics kits. It’s just something they enjoy doing. They look at the instructions and do it on their own. Right now we’re doing Ancient Egypt only. We are not doing any science. Over the summer we did a nature journal, and we studied insects. So you don’t have to do both science and history at the same time.
Right now it’s after lunch. This is reading time. This is my oldest son, and he’s reading a book. He also reads the Bible, and he colors in one square for each chapter that he reads. He just finished Exodus. So he reads during this hour and a half. That’s when he does his assigned reading. We’re finished with our homeschool day by noon.
Hi! I'm Susan Evans. I speak at homeschool conferences about hands-on learning and run a huge unit study membership site. I also speak at women's retreats on the topic of prayer.
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