Story of the World Volume.1: Ancient Times

I bought this set from another homeschooler since it was rather costly for our budget if we were to ship it in. As always we always try to be good stewards with the money we have been so blessed with and seek out alternatives instead of brand new.

Our little way of trying to reduce consumption.

As I shared since these set were used, the workbooks that came with it had some missing activity pages. So I can't quite tell if the activities in the series are good or not. So far I can only say that the text have been worded in a manner that is engaging and informative for our kids age 4, 6 and 8.

I love the ideas or projects in the Activity Book but I do a fair bit of tweaking and improvisation just to make sure I do not feel overwhelmed nor have to stick to what it says. I will post and share a few pages of the activities for those who would like to have a look see of how it is like when I manage to snap pictures of it.

Learning about papyrus

The boys weren't too interested in making papyrus that day, so only Big M and a neighbour's kid came by to do this together. Since we didn't have the papyrus plant, we decided to get creative and cutup some old magazine into strips and mixing them with PVC glue dissolved in water. The result isn't fantastic but it helps the girls get the idea of how papyrus needs to be 'weaved' or laid out in overlapping patterns. We watched these two video on YouTube that gave us a pretty good idea about the art of making papyrus and a brief history of it. Last Papyrus Makers in Egypt & How to Make Papyrus Paper.

Map of Egypt

I sourced out some free resources from Scholastic for the maps. As scattered brain as I am I can't locate the link to the topic in Scholastic regarding the topic. Only managed to locate the direct link to the PDF which you can download. 

Got really lovely print outs of the different crowns for Lower and Upper Egypt from Artyfactory where kids coloured them and wrote down their own notes.

DIY Templates for the Sarcophagus

So we did cover the Sarcophagus previously when we first started Volume 1, where we did a papier-mâché version of it. Due to space constraints, we had to discard them, kids spent quite some effort to get it done and they were really decently done for their age. Obviously they were saddened by it but understood we lack space to store anymore than we can now. 

Kids brushing on diluted PVC glue onto their paper sculptures 

Using DIY brushes made out of plastic bottles and boxes to brush on PVC glue for paper strips

Hence my decision to revisit the activity but allow them to create a 2D version where they could keep it in their notebooks. I didn't really know how or where I could find templates for what I had in mind. So I simply doodled three images in the likes of the Russian Doll and got the children to design their own Sarcophagus by referencing to some images we pulled up through Google. Here a short video of how our project ended up looking.