As we embarked on homeschooling, it became obvious to me that we would be following a different path than what was planned out for the kids in public school. As I talked with each of them about what they had been studying in social studies, math, communication arts, etc. I realized that even though the subject was studied, they didn’t have a strong grasp on some of the aspects of each topic. So… we decided to start at the beginning. Now that doesn’t mean I’m teaching my 12 year old to read and color, it just means that we’ve decided to take a chronological approach to our educational path with history paving the way. So we begin when documented history began… in Ancient Egypt… as we study about ancient civilizations, we tie in our reading, writing, math (to a certain degree), and science topics (although at some point we’ll have to circle back in science and review prehistoric times… big bang, dinosaurs, origin of species, etc.) Everything is leveled, meaning my 12 y.o. writes papers whilst my 8 y.o. gather facts, etc. It’s all very convenient how it ties together. The math is an outlier in a lot of cases. I mean I can create elaborate word problems relating to ancient historical situation and figures, but really, they need to learn a lot more than that. [J] is set to finish 7th grade math by the holidays and then onto Algebra in 8th grade after the beginning of the year. We’ll see if we meet that goal or not, but it’s our plan. [M] was using Singapore math before and is comfortable with those concepts (which were difficult for me to adjust to) so we opted to pick up where he left off… but I’m off in the weeds a bit… back to Egypt.

The St. Louis Art Museum in Forest Park has a wonderful display of 3 very well preserved and complete mummies. In addition, they have ancient Egyptian artifacts like luck charms, burial urns, statues of Gods and Goddesses, hieroglyphics on stone tablets, jewelry, etc. It was truly amazing how much our literature and text reading had sunken in and the boys were all over the exhibit saying, “I remember reading about this…” and “Hey Mom, here’s one of those {insert name} that we saw in that book…”. My oldest even caught an erroneous fact delivered by the Museum Docent to a small class that was visiting the exhibit on a field trip. I must say, I was as proud as a peacock.

So I took some fun pictures of them perusing the exhibit and then took some time to really look carefully myself. After all, this is new territory for me. I can’t ever remember, in all my education, studying Ancient Egypt. So I’m learning right along with them and it’s FUN!

I’ll try to post a few more soon. The picture up top is a mummy mask that was created by Egyptian priests in the likeness of the dead woman. The black is resin and the gold is gold leaf. Only the wealthiest of people would have had such an ornate mask created for them.

More can be seen here and here.

Popularity: 3% [?]