Frida Kahlo self portraits

L's Little Passport country this month is Mexico.  She has been reading books about life in modern day Mexico as well as the Aztecs and Mayans.  She can't get over the fact that the Aztecs used to make human sacrifices to their gods.  Very gruesome indeed!

We've been listening to Mexican music in the car and eating tacos!

We couldn't forget a very important Mexican woman and that is of course Frida Kahlo.  I've been wanted to study her life and artwork with L for a while now and this was the perfect opportunity.

L had read about Frida's life in her awesome book Girls Who Rocked the World.  We also looked at her artwork on the computer and watched this neat video  that morphs many of Frida's self portraits in and out.

The most fun of course was trying our hand at our own self portraits.  We used oil pastels and a looked at ourselves on the computer to complete our portraits.  

I absolutely adore how L's turned out.

L's self portrait

 Mommy's self portrait

L said she looks older in hers and I look younger in mine.  Thanks a lot! hehe

All About Egypt

We have a budding Egyptologist in our midst!

After starting The Story of the World-The Ancients it's all pyramids, pharaohs and mummies in our household.

L got a subscription to Little Passports for her birthday and the first country just happened to be Egypt.  L was beside herself with excitement.  It came with this tiny pyramid to excavate.  After a very long time trying to get out the treasure she finally unearthed a small bust of King Tut!

The Little Passports kit also came with a map and some cute activities.

We talked about how the ancient Egyptians wrote using hieroglyphics and invented papyrus paper.  We had a great time writing out messages to each other in hieroglyphics and trying to decode them.

The Story of the World also talks about cuneiform writing on clay tablets.  L wrote out a message into air drying clay.  

This was such an easy yet effective project.  Using toilet paper rolls and taping the tops together L was able to make some cat mummies.  She used gold paint and sharpies.  They are so cute!

I have to take a moment here to say how wonderful our library is.  L has read so many books on ancient Egypt she is somewhat of an expert.

One of her books had projects and games that children would have played in ancient Egypt.  One of the games was called senet and there were instructions on how to make up one to play.  L was soooo excited to make this.  We used an old chocolate box for the board and L made up sticks with Egyptian designs on them for the counting.  This is such a cool method instead of using dice.  You just throw the sticks and which ever ones land with the design up is the number you move your piece.  Such a simple concept but we had fun playing several games.

The biggest highlight of our Egypt study was our Egyptian family meal.  L read up on how the Egyptians ate on the floor and used only their hands and bowl of water for washing them.  We had bread, olives, feta cheese, falafels, cucumber, dates and several other things on a mat in our living room while listening to Egyptian music.  This was so much fun as everyone in the family dressed up.  

We made headbands for the kids with tin foil asps on them and I made up L's eyes with dark make up.  She was over the moon.  We also made collars earlier in the day that the kids coloured.

 Here is L's scrapbook that she created with facts and info on Egypt. If you look closely you can see some pics of our dinner.

Last thing.  I finally found some shrinky dink paper for L to made flags.  I've seen this idea all over Pintrest and L so badly wanted to do it.  She will make up a flag for all of our Little Passport countries to start.

Ancient Egypt was a blast!

The River System

We have moved on in our geography unit to rivers of the world.  I gave L a list of the top 10 longest rivers in the world and she had to find them in her atlas and then mark them on a world map.

We also went into more depth about actual river systems and after looking at some handouts on rivers and answering some questions L made up this diagram.

I love how she added in the little bird.

We found a wealth of information on the fantastic site Kid World Citizen.

Topographical Maps

Last week we were all about topographical maps.  We started off by looking at a handout on how topographical maps are made and looked at the physical picture of a place and then the topographical map.

Then the fun began.  L made up a tiny mountain range with two peaks.  She trace around it and then I took a piece of string and sliced a layer off the bottom.  She traced her mountain range again.  I kept slicing off layers and she kept tracing them until at the end she had made a topographical map of her mountain range.  We decided that each layer would represent 10meters so at the end L was able to see how tall each peak was.  It was so cool that we tried a few other types of mountains.

Once she had a firm understanding of how a topographical map is made she matched the landforms on this sheet.  L wanted to make one of the landforms so we did the opposite and made layers from one of the topographical maps and put them together.

Yup.  A topographical map of L's hand.  She loved this!

Maps and Mapping

We started our mapping study by re-reading Me on the Map by Joan Sweeny.  We did several activities years ago with this that you can read about

  here.

This time L made a map of her bedroom.  I love how she drew her chair from a bird's eye view!

We also read the fantastic book Follow that Map by Scot Ritchie .  The book follows a group of children looking for their pets through all different types of maps.

I brought out of a map of our town and L and I took turns giving each other compass directions to different places.  We also looked in our family atlas (which happens to be from 1965!!!) and enjoyed seeing how different countries had changed names and borders.  The population maps were also very interesting!

Next up was making a treasure map.  We found some wonderful tutorials on Youtube that we followed.  Below is L's treasure map.  She wrote the directions to the treasure on the back of the map.

We talked about topographical and physical maps and then prepared to make a physical map of Africa.  Once again looking at the atlas and maps on the Internet L sketched out different landforms on a small map of Africa.

I then drew an outline of Africa on a big  piece of card stock and L added in all of the landforms.  She used modelling clay for the mountains, embroidery thread for the rivers, felt for the lakes and sparkles for the deserts. So much fun!

After she completed the landforms she made a legend and labelled all of the major rivers, lakes, mountains and deserts.