Saturday, August 29, 2009

Hannah has a job!

Hannah had me take her up to Kings Island today to interview for a job during their Halloween event called HAUNT! I was a little apprehensive since the competition for jobs is pretty intense, but she did just fine and was hired to work on the scariest trail in the park as a psychotic cowgirl or so is our understanding, she goes for training in a few weeks to learn her "role". It is only a seasonal gig running from late September until Halloween, but it will look great on her resume!

I guess I am going to have to stop HATING that place, with its loud noises, concrete oasis and ridiculous prices....since it now serves as gainful employment for both my eldest son and daughter! And guess what America? They both managed to get themselves JOBS WITHOUT sitting in a classroom, using a curriculum or taking a proficiency test! They aren't sitting on my couch expecting me to wait on them hand and foot! Guess maybe this unschooling thing really can work!

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Studying King Tut

We were THRILLED to be offered free tickets to see the King Tut exhibit at the Indianapolis Childrens Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana. It took us about 2 1/2 hours to get there, but it was certainly worth the drive. The exhibit is absolutely amazing and very well done. I would highly recommend the exhibit to everyone. I was a little worried about the crowd and seemingly long line to enter the exhibit, but it wasn't as bad as it looked, and once in the we were ushered into the exhibit we were free to take our time and explore. The only "bummer" for me was that we weren't allowed to take photographs. Because we had spent some time in the weeks leading up to the trip studying ancient Egypt, even Sophia and William really seemed to enjoy themselves. They loved trying to pick out what letters they could identify in heiroglyphics and comparing the death masks we made at home to the ones on display.

Here are some of the links we used in our study:

This is the guide from the museum, we didn't use it but others might find it informative:
http://www.childrensmuseum.org/tut/assets/docs/Tut_Unit.pdf

Make your own mummy interactive video game: http://kids.discovery.com/fansites/tutenstein/mummymaker/mummymaker.html we absolutely LOVED playing this game, much more fun the first time when we all made mistakes, OK, so at almost 40 year old, I should have known ACID wasn't the way to remove a brain!

Make a mummy (using a fish):
http://www.exploratorium.edu/bodies/webcast_activity.html this is one of the activities we are planning to do over the next few weeks, I am having a hard time finding the fish

Ancient Egypt Kids Connection:
http://www.guardians.net/egypt/kids/index.htm absolutely AWESOME site!

How to make a mummy mask:
http://www.art-rageous.net/MummyMask-LP.html We used this site to inspire us making our "death" masks!



Hieroglyphs Name Translator:
http://www.guardians.net/egypt/hieroglyphs/hiero-translator.htm Every translator we found online seemed to vary just a bit, but this one worked well for us!

Make your own pyramid:
http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0213185/root/makepyra2.html It should be noted that I had to go to 4 different grocery stores to find sugar cubes (now called sugar dots). Krogers and Walmart don't carry them. We found them at Biggs.

King Tut: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/tut.htm

King Tut's Life: http://www.kingtutone.com/tutankhamun/life/

Hieroglyphic Cartouche Pendants
http://www.art-rageous.net/Hieroglyphiccartouchependants-LP.html This were great fun to make and all 4 of the girls (including myself) and William even went so far as to make necklaces out of our pendants and wore them to the museum.



These were the particulars about the trip from the organizer (who for once wasn't me or Deanne!):
I have arranged a fieldtrip to the king Tut exhibit at the Indianapolis Childrens Museum. This is a free exhibit and free admission to the museum I have currently scheduled it for Monday August 24th. 10:00 AM until 5:00PM. Our king tut time is 11:00 AM. Our lunch time is 12:30 PM

Particulars
All children are free any age thru 12th grade.
We get 1 free adult for every 5 children.
Paid adults are 15.00 a person
I intend to let any adult who has 5 or more children go in free and split the cost among the rest of the adults ex. 20 kids 7 adults each adult would pay 6.45.

Monday, August 03, 2009

Hannah's Senior Portraits Round #2