Saturday, September 3, 2011

Beginning our Ancient Greek Activities

For history this year, I am teaching learning Ancient Greek history with my children during our homeschool days.  I try to cover history on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons.  Last week, we completed a salt dough map of Ancient Greece.
We mixed some flour, salt, and water to make the dough then we filled in the pencil sketched map with the dough onto a piece of blue cardboard that I already had partially painted from a previous project.  (Too bad that little fairy with wings in the photo didn't magically clean up the flour and salt from the counter with her magic wand when we were done :) )

One of my daughters making Mount Olympus

Our map is almost complete on the left with the paper copy we used to make our model on the right

Then it was time to paint the dough green for the land areas and the cardboard blue to show the different seas and label our map.

The Proud Cartographers (minus the fairy cartographer)
Cartography (from Greek chartis = map and graphein = write) is the study and practice of making maps

To clean up from the dough and paint, I had my kids clean their hands with...olive oil! We talked about how the ancient Greeks used to bathe with olive oil because Greece didn't have many rivers, and indoor plumbing didn't yet exist, so we put a little olive oil on our hands.  We all agreed that cleaning our skin with olive oil felt "greasy" and "yucky"! 










17 comments:

Hi Tracy,

Wow, this is such a great lesson! I am inspired to do this at home with my kids.

What a wonderful lesson! And I'm with you on the part about the magical clean-up . . .

What a wonderful lesson! And I'm with you on the part about the magical clean-up . . .

We have just finished Ancient Greece...your map is great!! What fun! My kids were enthralled with all the myths, too.

Have a great weekend!

Kylie said...

Love salt doughmaps, very cool.

Gidget said...

Looks like you guys had a great time building it together!

I have been meaning to try a salt dough map with my kids but haven't gotten around to it. Your cupcakes did a brilliant job:) Voted for you today:)

Mary said...

That looked super fun!

What fun! Wish we had tried this when we studied Greece.. I am so geographically challenged and it is spreding to the children! Maybe we will try another map? Umm? Food for thought.. Thanks for the inspiration!

By the way, I stumbled on NOBH and I really like the guidelines.. I am new to blog hopping and already find it difficult to search through the blogs.. Glad I discovered NOBH early in my blog hopping adventures! I've only participated in Hip Homeschool Hop and Weekly Wrap-up... Once!

HI Diana,
Great to hear from you online! Hope you get a chance to do a salt map with your kids, it is fun and relatively easy! My kind of craft! :)

Thanks Diane!
A magical cleanup...well would have been magical :)

HI Mary,
My oldest loves the myths too and has her favorite goddess! That's neat that you finished up a Greek unit! Thanks for stopping by!

Hi Kylie,
Thanks for stopping in! Salt maps are fun and easy to do for sure :)

Hi Gidget!
The kids had fun playing in the dough and using TONS of paint for the map :) Thanks for stopping by!

Hi Anna-Marie,
I hope you get to try the salt dough maps out sometime. Your kids would like them! :) Thanks for your comments and votes :)

Hi Mary,
It was a fun time! Thanks for stopping in to leave your comment!

Hi "Promise Christian Academy"
Thanks for stopping in to comment! I know what you mean about being geographically challenged as I speak from experience :) Making the map of Greece does help me remember locations as we read about the areas! So glad you enjoy NOBH too! Glad to have you link up :)

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