Cuneiform Seals

We attempted to make cuneiform seals with salt dough, since that is what I had on hand last week. The girls formed flat tablets and then let them dry. This afternoon, we attempted to use the seals in a print-making method. We painted them and then placed paper on top to see if it would make the image on the paper. They worked OK, not great, since it is hard to make the dough completely flat and then it also dries a bit warped. Still, how could it not be fun when paint is involved?!

What to Do With a Three-Year Old

My son just turned 3 years old, and one present he received was a subscription to Wild Animal Baby magazine, which is perfect for his age! We were reading it last week and he seemed to enjoy the porcupine finger play in it, so I thought we would just go with what we were reading and build some activities for him to do. We made salt dough and formed it into porcupine shapes and then he stuck toothpicks into them (we did something similar with the girls several years ago). Today, we finally got around to painting it,so here are his porcupines.

The Story of the World

We are using Susan Wise Bauer's The Story of the World vol. 1 for our history this year, and so far it has been really fun! We will travel from ancient times through the fall of Rome, reading stories, mapping events, coloring pictures, creating a personal book of time and even making lots of fun crafts! So far, the girls seem to be enjoying it. Last night one of them told a friend of ours that Abraham was from Ur in the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia, which means "between two rivers." I was pretty impressed!
The format we follow is to read aloud to them the story/lesson for the day and then ask them some questions and have them narrate back to me in a few sentences what we read. They may or may not draw a picture to go with their narration. Then, every couple of days, we map the events we have been reading about. I just began our Book of Time, so my plan is to have us add a picture from what we read as we are reading along to "map" the events in time, too.
Susan Wise Bauer suggests lots of great additional reading sources, and we have been having great fun coming home from the library with 20-30 books at a time!She also suggests various hands-on activities to make it real to the kids as we are learning. We went on an "archaeological dig" in our garden a few weeks ago to try our hand at figuring out who lived there. We made ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets using clay and writing our names in cuneiform on them. I must recommend that you read the clay package first and make sure it is not the kind that "never dries out!" Especially if you play to put it in the oven to dry faster! :)
One of our recent fun activities was to make mummies. Our activity book includes directions on how to make real chicken mummies, but I thought that sounded too involved and perhaps rather stinky, so I found another post here on how to make mummies from Barbie dolls (sounded a lot less messy!). After heading to the dollar store and goodwill to find two barbies and a ken doll, we got to work last week.
Here are the pics:
(I think the girls' favorite part was cutting off the dolls' hair beforehand, though I didn't get pictures of it. They looked at me twice when I told them to do it and then had big smiles on their faces as they got out their scissors.)

The vinegar wash was quite the hit with the kids. :)

They weren't too keen on the messiness of the cinnamon/oil mixture, either. I reminded them to be glad they were not the priests who would have been doing this on real people!

The salt was a bit more fun, though we had to do some pretty extensive sweeping afterwards!

Our "finished" products, waiting to dry.

And here they are, nice and hardened and cinnamon-y smelling. :) It did look a bit weird to have three mummies lying out on our porch, though, I think. :)