Chinese Wood Block Printing

As we have worked our way through another chapter in our Story of the World book, we discussed some contributions the Chinese have made to civilization. After reading about wood block printing we went ahead and did a mock printing craft that they had a lot of fun with.

First we drew simple pictures on cardboard and then layed glue soaked yarn on the pictures.

After letting it dry overnight, we coated a paper plate with paint. I used a paintbrush to try to get an even surface for them to press their yarn pictures into. When you press your yarn down on the paint, you have to make sure the yarn was covered with the paint. Seems obvious but the kids didn't really get it until they saw the negative space on their cardboard with paint and then it sort of ruins their design.

After talking about monks, monasteries, scriptoriums and letter illumination, they got the fact that wood block printing was much more efficient to mass produce written text.

It's a Monks Life!

We have been reading through the book, Story of the World this year. If you have never seen or heard about this book I would totally suggest checking it out of the library.

There are 4 volumes that cover the history of the world. I bought volume one last year since it went with the history we were memorizing with Classical Conversations, but never got into it. I went ahead and ordered volume two for this year and we have been working our way through it and loving it. I ordered the activity book to go with it, which is not the cheapest thing out there. However, I think it's worth it. We have just finished reading about monks, monasteries, scriptoriums and how they would make books. To go with this, the activity book has an illuminated letter to color that we did.

 I also looked up illuminated letters on the internet to give the kids other ideas of what they looked like. Here's a few examples to get you started.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Illuminated.bible.closeup.arp.jpg
http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/Paper-exhibit/images/E3856_0015.jpg

We also had a monk's dinner that evening. The activity book had a recipe for this soup and recomended bread, cheese and apple slices to go with it. The kids enjoyed tasting a simple meal that a monk would eat. In all honesty, the simpler the meal, the more likely the kids will eat it anyways.

I can't believe how much I am learning each day!

Plant and Cell Animal Model crafts

So, Big Sister had to memorize a list of some of the parts of the plant and animal cells. After two weeks of working on this, we created models of the cells that contained the parts she had to memorize.

I did some looking around online and other people used lots of things to do this. Paper, pancakes, jello and pizza were just a few that I found. I decided to use cookies to help us learn. I love sweets and after just having a baby thought what better way to get a sugar fix.

This was my first time trying to bake gigantic cookies though, and it was a bit tricky. Getting the centers to firm up took more time than I wanted, so the edges were a little more done than I like typically. Although as cookies cool they tend to firm up a bit. Here are our cookies. Yum!

We used frosting as the cytoplasm, pull apart Twizzlers as the mitocondria and the cell membrane, fruit strips as the vacuoles and the golgi bodies and, flattened taffy as the nucleus and green skittles as the chloroplasts.

 

Little guy wanted in on the action! We kept a digital diagram up on the computer as we worked on our cells. Once we finished, Big Sister had to recall what each item was so she and little sister could have some of their cookies. It took a little time, but she was proud of herself once she remembered.

 

We checked out some resources that I had found on Pinterest.

 

3D Video- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nqd9jYQEzw

 

Interactive site- http://www.cellsalive.com/cells/3dcell.htm (check out How Big is a? on the left side)

 

Cell Rap- http://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=-zafJKbMPA8 (the girls were singing this the rest of the day)

 

Diagram of both plant and animal cells- http://www.kathimitchell.com/cells.html

 

 

 

7 Wonders of the Ancient World Craft- Classical Conversations

 

This week in Classical Conversations we studied the 7 wonders of the ancient world. We decided to make a book about the wonders. I found some coloring sheets to print out for her to color. Most of them I found here, but there were a few that I had to google and find the images that way.

After she colored and cut them out, she pasted them on some plain white paper. We read about each wonder in The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by Reg Cox and Neil Morris.

I love this book! We checked it out at the library.

 

Then we worked on a paragraph for each wonder. Writing skills are hard to master, but model, model, model. As we read we talked about what she thought were interesting facts. We talked through sentences as I wrote them on the white board. She simply coppied them from the white board. I usually tried to compile three sentences to create these paragraphs.

 

When we finish the book I'll update the post. This is really a fun way to learn a little about each wonder. We also watched this video off You Tube. 7 Wonders Video