Control by Crown

When we first started homeschooling many years ago, I came upon an audio copy of The Story of the World, Ancient Times. We hadn't really listened much to it, and then Zhara became absolutely obsessed with mythology. Ah ha, I thought the other day, I wonder if that is still on the computer, and if it has anything about gods and goddesses on it. So the other day I went looking, and found it. I loaded it on to my ipod, and recently when we were in the car, I asked if anyone would be interested in listening to a bit of it. We listened to the part about nomads in the Egyptian desert, and then today we listened a little bit more. We learned about the upper and lower kingdoms of Egypt, and how about 5000 years ago a war was fought between the two kingdoms for control of Egypt. The kids liked the information about the one king having a white crown, and other a red crown, and that when the Egyptian king with the white crown was victorious, he took the other king's crown. He then placed it on top of his own, and from then on the Egyptian crown had both red and white portions to show that the pharaoh controlled both parts of Egypt. We decided to decorate our own colorful crowns to represent their "kingdoms".

I cut crowns out of poster board, and then the kids painted them with tempura paint.

Angus went with an all yellow theme.

Zhara with six large blocks of color.

Wednesday with a rainbow motif.

Dad was home sick today, so he even got to help out a little with the project.

The kids have been really excited to paint ever since I bought a big pack of new paintbrushes at JoAnn's the other night.

As always, one of their favorite parts of painting, is mixing colors, and seeing just what new unique combination they end up with.


We talked about pictures as representation, and I told them about hieroglyphics. Then we printed out this hieroglyphics translator, and decided that later in the week we would try and write our names in hieroglyphics.

Zhara stapled everyone's crowns together. The crowns were a big hit. The kids even used some of the scraps from the poster board to create other items for their kingdoms. Angus made a flag, and Wednesday and Zhara made arm bands. Angus has, of course, already stolen Wednesday's crown, and placed it on top of his own in a hostile takeover of Wednesday's country. That is, of course, to be expected, and likely to happen many more times before it gets old. :)

Zhara is really rocking the regal look.

Wednesday is one happy, if albeit partially nude, ruler.