History Projects for Weeks 1-4

This year we are using Story of the World, Volume 1 for history. It is the first formal history we have done. For the past few years we have done sporadic, interest led history. It worked well, but I have always said I would start something a little more substantial in the 4th grade. So here we are. My plan so far is to read for 4 weeks. A chapter/section per day. We always go over the questions, most of the time we do the narration and sometimes we do the map work. Then on the 5th week we do only projects and writing assignments based on the previous 4 week's readings.So we are on our 5th week....we have read from the nomads though the first civilizations in the Indus Valley. On Monday we set up our time line and reviewing what we read as we added each date. Then Rylan and Cale each wrote a paragraph telling the story of how Egypt was united. Then they each made a cuneiform tablet.

This is Cohen's depiction of an astronaut in space.....

On Tuesday, we had a lot of other outside of the house things to do, so their history was short and only included drawing what they thought Enkidu from the story of Gilgamesh looked like.

Wednesday....they wrote their "Code of Laws" and we made Sumerian Seals out of clay.

We also made a ziggurat out of Legos.


Thursday's writing assignment was to write the steps of how a mummy was made. And then Rylan and Cale made a step pyramid out of Legos, and attempted to make a smooth sided one, but we ran out of those pieces.


And I helped Lakin and Cohen build one out of our Mega Blocks.


Today, they each wrote a paragraph on what they thought happened to the Monhenjo-Daro civilization and then we built a house from that time period out of little clay bricks.


And that concludes our first 5 weeks. We are taking off next week, as we always do, because we have 3 birthdays to celebrate. So for the next 2 days my full attention will be on: