History is Alive :: Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Again our history came along the other week with another fabulous activity to bring home our topic. This week we talked about the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar and his marrying the Persian princess so that Persia wouldn't attack Babylon. This arrangement worked well for Persia too who were worried that Babylon would attack them. 

Who it didn't work well for was the Persian princess. She agreed to the marriage but was lonely for the beautiful Persian mountains once she was living in dry, flat, boring Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar it turns out loved the princess as soon as he saw her and wanted to make her happy.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were born.

So we set out to make our own hanging gardens. We went to our neighborhood nursery (really our neighbors, Johnson Bros Greenhouses) and picked out plants. The selection was limited because we are quite early in the planting season but I was THRILLED to find ranunculus. I see these plants each year in baskets and containers but by the time I'm buying plants they are gone...not this year! 

Each kid picked out a trailing pansy and I picked out 4 ranunculus plants for the center of the baskets. #5 helped too!

After lunch and quiet time we got out our planting supplies and filled our baskets with potting soil and planted out plants. Everybody buddied up for the filling and picking of plants.

And the carrying of the finished products to the back yard.

We stood around and admired our finished work.

:: this moment ::

:: this moment ::  A photo from the week. Not too many words. A simple moment, extraordinary, special. Something I want to remember, cherish, to pause over. If you have a "moment" leave a link in the comments for others to find and share.

inspired by soulemama

I couldn't pick between the two! 


A snow day! We don't get many of them! They played in the snow...we spent the rest of the day cuddled on the couch reading The Long Winter. What a good day!

D is for Duplo

After realizing #3 would be in kindergarten next year I decided on a course of action to make our ABC book and make sure he had all the letters down well.

Find A, B and C if you're interested.



This week I had big plans for covering D and E, but I only got to D...


So we got out a couple of Duplo block and the paint. The boys thought this was awesome! This was another project that they really took to...spending a lot of time on it and making sure that the entire paper was covered. I was really happy that they didn't start smearing paint everywhere though, I really wanted to be able to tell what the painting was about!

I did say they didn't start smearing...that doesn't mean they weren't covered in paint!

Links:
D is for Duplo from Delightful Learning

:: this moment ::

:: this moment ::  A photo from the week. Not too many words. A simple moment, extraordinary, special. Something I want to remember, cherish, to pause over. If you have a "moment" leave a link in the comments for others to find and share.

inspired by soulemama

There are many ways to work on spelling words.

A little something for my water

I've had a problem all school year. We're working right along or sitting at the table together reading through our history. Then I pass out papers. And one lands in the puddle of water left from my water glass. Of course everything has to pause while we get another piece of paper. And that's if it wasn't a project paper that was just ruined by the water.

So I've had a coaster brewing in my mind. Of course that means I need some sewing time and that is rather hard to come by...

After reading Soulemama's post about practical sewing, last night was my night! I dug through my scrap basket and pulled together a coaster.

No more water puddles!

The blue stripe was from a quilt attempt for #5. My mom has passed on the red star in the center and the purple batik binding. The green? Many moons ago (like 12? years) some friends from church made an apron for another friend out of this 50's appliance/housewife fabric. I loved it. They gave me some of the scraps and I've had some little pieces floating around the basket since then. This was the perfect project to fit them into! I love that I'll get to look at it everyday...

Love it!

Sibling gifts

The last couple of birthdays have included a new activity around the World of Wiedz. A lot of planning and sketching and hidden making time. So cute!

#1 is the most involved at this point. #2 could care less and really hasn't jumped in yet. #3 was very thoughtful and specific about what he wanted to do. #4 is very last minute about his gifts but so determined!

#3's birthday was a couple of weeks ago and included a couple handmade, sibling gifts.

#4 insisted on making a stuffed shoe. We got home from taking #3 to his speech school ON his birthday and #4 saw #1 finishing her gift and just had to join in! I drew a shoe shape, cut it out of muslin, stitched it together, let him draw all over the outside...

He insisted the green across the shoe reads "happy birthday [#3] from [#4]!" So cute!

Then stuffed it nice and full... I finished it off with a whip-stitch and we were in business.

#1 on the other hand had planned out her gift for many weeks...though it did take us until that very day to get it finished! Our #3 is crazy about soccer so #1 made him a soccer ball pillow. I used this project to finish off a couple of Girl Scout requirements. She was really pleased with how it came out.

So was he!

Since we're all here, I might as well show off the sibling-made gifts for #2 and #4's birthdays many months ago...

#3 made #2 a bookmark (inspired by Soulemama's Homemade Home or The Creative Family, I can't remember and don't want to spend my internet time figuring out which one :)) and made #4 a pillow with a spider drawn on it. He was very proud of both and helped or did the work himself!

#1 used a book from the library as her inspiration for new warmy bags for each of her brothers. Decorated with fabric pens to match them in personality and likes. She sewed them herself too!

I'm loving this new tradition and will work on nurturing it both in creativity and the attitude of giving. Though I may try to get things done before the DAY of a birthday!

C is for Carrots

After realizing #3 would be in kindergarten next year I decided on a course of action to make our ABC book and make sure he had all the letters down well.


Find A and B if you're interested.


Last week since we were "rowing" The Carrot Seed we went ahead and cut out triangles of orange and green construction paper and made carrots of our own.

Rowing :: The Carrot Seed

We "rowed" The Carrot Seed this week. Such a cute book! The character is nameless which didn't sit well with us so we named him, #3 thought Carrot and #4 chose Caden. Our week was really packed with other things but I love how these things just fit right in low pressure and make wonderful memories.

Lapbook ::

A carrot sizing book. Really simple. They cut everything put themselves and glued the carrots in the right spots.

 In the Kitchen ::

What's a week about carrots without carrot cake. This idea was also in the science book we are using right now but I wasn't up for having four kids in the kitchen. The boys measured, cracked, stirred, grated...all the great parts of being in the kitchen.

We had cake after dinner that night, our favorite night of the week, the first evening no one has to go anywhere! No one was big fans (loved the cream cheese frosting though) so Mr. Wiedz took the rest to the neighbors.

Math ::

I found a website with a fun idea about graphing the seeds. They counted apple seeds for a week. We were eating through a bag of pears and a bag of apples last week so I decided to graph both together depending on our snack each morning.

Getting apple seeds out of the apples turned out trickier than I would have thought. The boys had fun counting seeds each day though. At the end of the week we talked about which one gave us the most seeds, what day we got the most, etc.

Carrot Prints ::

And we broke out the paints again this week! Oh my! I gave each boy a plate of paint, a carrot with the top cut off and a piece of paper. They could use the top as a round stamp and the rest of the carrot to roll around and get the long side print. They really liked this one!

 Planting ::

Lastly we planted some seeds in paper towels/jars. I'm hoping to update this post with growing seeds showing their roots, stems and leaves through the jars. Keep your fingers crossed!

Overall, a great book and a lot of fun activities that the boys and I enjoyed. We are taking a week off from "rowing" but I'm continuing our alphabet work and will post about those soon.

Next up: The Red Carpet (though not for a couple of weeks).

Links ::
Homeschool Share

Disclaimer: I've joined Amazon's Associates program so if you click on a link for a book I've told you about it'll go to the Amazon page. I guess (since it hasn't happened yet) that if someone makes a purchase because of the clicking through they did from my page I'll get a little token from Amazon. So I'll say thank you to you for clicking from here.

History is Alive :: Dyeing fabric like the Phonecians

Well these last few weeks we've been working on more ancient cultures of the Middle East. One of the cultures was the Phoenicians.

One thing we learned in our reading was that the Phoenicians used snails from the Mediterranean Sea to dye fabric a purple color. They were famous for the purple cloth they made and traded.

An idea in the activity book was to use purple cabbage to dye fabric. Easy enough.

First we made predictions about the smell of the boiling cabbage. We'd learned that the Phoenician cities that did the dyeing were very smelly places.

Then we let the cabbage boil for about an hour like the book suggested.

We strained out the cabbage pieces and put our muslin in to dye. I'd spent a couple hours the night before embroidering the letters of our names on each piece. One, we'd be able to tell them apart. Two, I thought it might be interesting to see if there was a difference in the way the cloth dyed verses the muslin cotton.

We rinsed the pieces in salt water and laid them out to dry.

But we got ugly, not purple but not muslin, colored cloth. And the house did stink (though #2 thought it smelled like broccoli, his favorite vegetable). I hadn't had one little ingredient the activity book listed for this activity, alum. I'm sure the results would have been better had I used it.

Not wanting to end our lesson with a flop. I went back to the activity book remembering there were a couple of options for getting purple fabric.

Break out the frozen blueberries.

Not wanting to use our beautiful berries we picked with our own hands I used a couple of old 1/2 used packages of store-bought blueberries I had languishing in the freezer. The book suggesting cooking for an hour but it didn't take nearly that long to get a nice syrup for our clothes. Strain the blueberries out and enter our cloth for a second dip.

And the house smelled better!

After a couple of hours in the blueberry syrup we rinsed again and laid out to dry. Beautiful purple fabric!

Another rinse a couple of days later and some pairings from the scrap basket and we had fun keepsakes from our Phoenician dyeing project.

This project also turned out to be a nice science lesson too! A lot of predicting of smells and results. We kept a record of the steps and what we thought would happen. Bonus!

*****
Disclaimer: something I've been meaning to add...I've joined Amazon's Associates program so if you click on a link for a book I've told you about it'll go to the Amazon page. I guess (since it hasn't happened yet) that if someone makes a purchase because of the clicking through they did from my page I'll get a little token from Amazon. So I'll say thank you to you for clicking from here.