The Diary of Anne Frank

Last year for her birthday L received a book called Girls Who Rocked the World from her Auntie.  It consists of short stories of women throughout history and modern day who have somehow "rocked the world".  This has been one of the most influential books L has ever read.  She constantly re-reads bits and refers to it.  She has also become almost obsessed with the stories of some of the women in the book.

Last year it was Joan of Arc.  L took out all the books she could find at the library on the subject and became a Joan of Arc expert.  She wrote a short essay on her life which she presented at an open mic night.  She still wants to be her for Halloween.

This summer she moved on to a new heroine.  Anne Frank.  I have to say I was really hoping to leave learning about WWII until L was older than 7 so I didn't encourage it.   L wouldn't be put off and once again got out all of the books she could find on Anne Frank from the library.  She read them all and then started asking questions.  I really tried to not go into too much detail while still being able to  relay the horrors of that time.  Finally I gave in and said that she and I could read Anne Frank's actual diary together.

We took our time and read excerpts together at night before bed.  After finishing we looked into what happened to Anne and her fellow Secret Annex members.  We also watched a few videos on tours of the actual secret annex.  It is really such a hard thing to talk about and so heart breaking.  

I felt like L needed to do something to feel some sort of conclusion to the whole subject.  She ended up doing this clever "Who am I?" book.  It is really the perfect little project to put together research information in a creative way.

You can find the tutorial here on Susan Gaylord's blog.

These are so cute and I can see us using them a lot for different research projects throughout the year.

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!

Helen Keller and the senses

Pintrest is a magical, wonderful place where you can find absolutely anything you can imagine!  When it comes to learning there is no need to try and re-invent the wheel.  Just a quick search and you have projects, worksheets and references galore on any subject.

Once day as I was wondering around the Pintrest world I discovered this cool printout on braille.  This spurred me on to order some books from the library about Helen Keller.  I also printed out an American Sign Language alphabet which L was already familiar with.

Today the books arrived.  The first book Helen Keller the world in her heart by Lesa Cline-Ransome is a beautiful book that while relaying the story also shows the amazing beauty in our world.  L read this by herself as soon as we got home from the library.  I hadn't told her anything about this project before hand so she was full of questions.

The second book Helen Keller A Determined Life by Elizabeth MacLeod has real photographs and quotes from Helen and Annie Sullivan and goes into much more detail about her life as an adult.  We read this book together and talked about what it would be like to not be able to hear, see or communicate and how frustrating it would be.

I spelled out "W-A-T-E-R" in L's hand using the hand signs that Annie Sullivan used and we both couldn't even imagine how many times she would have had to do that to Helen before it started to make sense.

I tied a scarf around L's head and let her explore the house that way.  She found it scary and tricky and didn't keep the blindfold on for long but did try to identify all the objects she was touching.

Last night I prepared some cards to go along with the braille alphabet.  I just pin punched some simple words onto some card stock for L to try to figure out.  She LOVED it and was completely absorbed in trying to figure them out.  At the end I wrote a full sentence "I love you".  It took her a while to get this one as we realized that some of the letters are very similar, the dots are just closer together.

After she'd figured out all of the words she tried her hand at making up some for me.  This was a super fun activity.  It really helped us to realize how tricky it would be to do it all blind as we were looking at the alphabet the whole time we tried to figure it out.