SOTW Ch. 15 - The Phoenicians

We started back to school yesterday and covered Ch. 15 of SOTW about the Phoenicians. The first part of the story talked about how the Phoenicians invented glass blowing. We watched a video of a glass blower at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4079871377202668373&q=glass+blowing&hl=en


I'd also bought a "glass art" kit from Scholastic recently and we played with it. It's more like stained glass then glass blowing. I made a Hello Kitty face and Alexandra made a balloon, a bear, and a bluebird.

I also thought I had some plastic bubbles, but we couldn't find them. With plastic bubbles, you place some of the bubble-material on the end of a small "pipe" and blow a bubble. We weren't able to do it, but she remembered them so it was a great way to explain glass blowing.

Today, we read about Princess Dido (pronounced "Dee Dough") of Tyre and the ox skin. She fled from her brother and went to Carthage. She wanted to purchase some land and the local ruler told her she could purchase as much land as she could enclose with an ox skin. She cut the skin into hundreds of tiny strips and was able to purchase a large piece of land.

For a demonstration, I cut out a "skin" from a piece of paper & we acted out the story. I'm so glad we did as I found out my daughter had misunderstood the story! As I cut out the strips, she laid them side by side instead of end to end. Anyway, we were able to show how one small "skin" could cover a large area! It was a neat, spur-of-the-moment idea!