For Thanksgiving, we are doing the Evan-Moor study entitled "Life in Plymouth Colony." It's a History Pocket book. Anyway, one of Alex's favorite things has been the tithing man and his pole. The tithing man who watched over the long church services. He had a pole (forgot if it has a name) that had a fur (or feather) on one end & a knob on the other. If a child was giggling or talking during church, the tithing man tapped him on the head with the knob. If anyone (except a baby) fell asleep during church, the tithing man tickled them under the nose to wake them up. If an adult smiled or talked during church, they had to pay a fine! Glad our church isn't so strict. :-)
The picture above shows Alex holding her Tithing Man's pole. Hopefully, she won't bring it to church! :-)
The past few weeks, we've been studying Italy. I must be running out of steam, as we did a little less for this country, too. We did have another Treasure Chest about Leonardo DaVinci. From that kit, we built a model of Da Vinci's flyer.
And, we'd picked up a book that had a model of the Coliseum. We made it, too. We've had fun studying countries, but we are going to take a break for November to study about Thanksgiving and then probably study Christmas Around the World in December.
I adapted this from something I read on a Core Knowledge website about insects. We filled a conatainer with Cheetos, drew a bee on Alex's finger and then had her finger "visit" the flower looking for nectar. When she picked up her bee finger, "pollen" was on her finger! A great way to demonstate pollination!
We didn't do near as much on Egypt as I had planned. We did go to the exhibit at HMNS. The 3D movie was great, but we kind of sped through the actual exhibit. The first photo is of Alex stamping hieroglyphics on papyrus. The second photo is Alex with a temple model we built. And the last photo is Alex as we were playing the Egyptian game, Senet. All of these items were from a Treasure Chest kit (it's available at Rainbow Resource, although we got it at a discount bookstore).
In October, we went to an Italian Festival. We had already eaten lunch so didn't try any of the main dishes, but we did try Italian doughnuts. They came coated in either powdered sugar (Alex's favorite) or cinnamon sugar. We also watched dancers doing Italian dances - especially tarantella's. A few weeks later, we were studying arachinds and read that the tarantella dances were started because of a ban on dancing! They created the dances saying they were "sweating out the poison from tarantulas." We even went on stage and danced a little! The photos didn't turn out very well because of the lighting. This photos is actually just two of the dancers having fun before the show. They wore tambourines tied to their belts.
While we were in Kansas, we also visited the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita. This was my first time there, although Alex had been there before. It was beautiful with lots of shade. We spent a lot of time watching the swans. One of them would "bark" at Alex if she hadn't fed her in a while. There was also a fish who liked to steal the food by popping out of a pipe.
In September, we went to the Cosmosphere while visiting family in Kansas. We'd never been before, and it was a great experience. They have lots of space memorabilia and we watched the IMAX film, Destination Imagination. We also went to a lecture/show about Dr. Goddard, the Father of Modern Rocketry. What a fascinating story! And, an exciting show, with plenty of explosions. We would highly recommend the Cosmosphere to anyone who has a chance to visit.
