Ancient Phoenicians and glassmaking

I didn't really know anything about the Phoenicians before this unit. We learned about two things they're famous for, their glassmaking and their purple dye (Phoenician purple or Tyrian purple)! 

I had heard, of course, about purple being the color of kings, and I knew the dye for it was really expensive. But I didn't know WHY. This article shows a man who has revived the ancient technique—which involves murex snail shells in HUGE quantities, extracting their glands, fermenting them, letting them sit in the sun for a little while but not too long, cooking them, etc.—and now I finally understand! https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/tunisian-enthusiast-recreates-sea-snail-purple-dye-that-defined-ancient-royals-2022-02-08/

I also didn't know how beautiful the purple color was. You can see why it was so loved!

This picture is from that man's Facebook page—it's cool to look at his pictures and see the bottles of beautiful powdered dye, etc. That article says that it takes 119  pounds of murex shells to produce a single gram of Tyrian purple!!

The other thing the Phoenicians were famous for was glassmaking. I love glassmaking (the Museum of Glass is one of my favorite museums we've ever visited!), but didn't know anywhere local we could go to watch it. So we just watched a bunch of videos.

This one is really interesting because it shows the technique the Phoenicians used—core-formed glass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBZb2bkn4KU

This just shows the making of a glass pitcher (not core-formed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtxrtKd-Vao

This video, "Glass skills with Bill," shows how to use honey to practice the rolling technique of keeping molten glass on your rod. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz1sUH7wDvA&t=2s 

And that gave me an idea! The honey reminded me of melted sugar, or caramel. I wondered if we could use hot caramel to mimic molten glass and try some of the glassmaking techniques! Then I found a recipe for sugar glass and that seemed like it would be perfect! This is the glass they use in movies when someone has to crash through a window or something. It breaks just like glass, but without the cost (and it's not quite as sharp, so less likely to cause injury).

We tried this recipe: https://www.inthekitchenwithmatt.com/edible-sugar-glass and it was a great success! I had just been hoping to move and mold the "glass" around a little, but Daisy had the idea of trying to actually blow it with metal straws, and it worked! I couldn't believe it! The blown "glass" doesn't hold its shape; it collapses almost immediately, but we made a few balls and bubbles with it and it definitely got the idea across. Very, very fun. 

You have to be careful, because it's very hot, of course, but this was one of our favorite projects during this unit!

This is cool too—Sugar stained glass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt8PhT-DMyE&t=45s

A little handle, like you'd make on a glass pitcher

Sugar-glass bubble! This one was actually thick enough to last. It finally shattered when we poked it—it looked so cool!

Thinner glass bubbles that shrunk into themselves as soon as the girls stopped blowing

A beautiful sheet of sugar glass! The Phoenicians would have been proud.

Ancient Egypt Activities

Studying Ancient Egypt is so fun! I love it. We repeated some of our favorite activities from our Ancient Egypt Unit several years ago (2017, wow!) and did a few new ones as well. Making sugar cube pyramids is actually not something we've done before, so it was fun to try that. We built some with the dry sugar cubes, and we also tried sticking them together with "mortar" (honey) to make them sturdier.

It's interesting to see firsthand how those perfect pyramid proportions are NOT inevitable. They take a lot of planning!

We didn't make papyrus this time (though we've tried that before), but we watched this really great video about how it's made. 

How to make papyrus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCR8n7qS43w

I'm not sure if all of Goldie's hieroglyphs are 100% authentic… :)

Cartouches! So fun.

Daisy and Junie still remembered making Pharaoh death masks from last time, and were excited to do it again, this time all by themselves!

Ziggy looked quite scary in his. It's the eyeless eyes, I think.

Daisy was the only one who remembered to make her stripes go out like sun-rays, and she made a false beard for hers, too. It turned out great!

It looked especially good when she dressed up like a Pharaoh in her skin-colored leotard, holding the crook and flail of the Ancient Pharaohs!

We didn't have a celebration for the Ancient Egypt section of this unit, and more's the pity. I have such great memories of our last one. Hopefully this will not be the last time we study Ancient Egypt!

Ancient Greece Activities

We didn't spend that much time on Ancient Greece. It was near the end of the time period we were covering, and I want to have a whole unit on it sometime soon! But we did talk about the Olympic Games, and the girls wanted to plan an Olympics for their stuffed animals and dolls. So we did!

There were gymnastics competitions for girls and dolls.

Pig-throwing contests.

Foot races

We awarded many medals at the end! Fun.

Another activity was making Minotaur mazes for each other to go in. Some of the children used legos. Some used blocks. And Daisy made this amazing paper maze game, with flaps you lifted to see if you encountered the minotaur or not. You could also collect swords and potions and such along the way, so you wouldn't immediately die when you ran into him. So fun!!

The Ancient Israelites, and the Jewish Religion

We learned about the Ancient Israelites over hundreds of years of history. I loved seeing how the history of the Bible fits in with world history, and getting a better idea of the world of the Old Testament! We are studying the Old Testament for Home Church this year, so we are reading many stories from the King James Bible, but I also checked out a bunch of Bible storybooks from the library. Our favorites were The Lion Bible for Children (here) and the DK Children's Bible Stories (here)—that one had some cool photos of ancient artifacts and maps along with the stories. 

One of our favorite activities, found in the fun book Old Testament Days, was making Israelite costumes and having a nomad's picnic. We just made tunics out of king-sized pillow cases (with neck- and armholes cut into them). We made a big drawstring bag which we used as our "table." And we ate flatbread and homemade yogurt and goat cheese (and hard-boiled eggs, which maybe wasn't authentic…did nomads have chicken? Maybe they ate quail eggs?). It was quite delicious.

It was also really interesting to learn about the Jewish religion and some of their holidays, both ancient and modern. These are holidays I've always heard of, but other than Hanukkah, I knew very little about the history of any of them! The girls had heard of lots of these holidays reading the All-of-a-Kind Family books, so they were excited to try out some of these fun traditions.

We cast our breadcrumbs on the water for Rosh Hashanah, and ate apples and honey. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year. 

We also made shofars to blow! (Er…sort of. Posterboard with a balloon is pretty much like ram's horns, right?)

We made cheese blintzes for Shavuot (dairy products remind the Jews of "the Land of Milk and Honey"!) Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses. To make blintzes, you make crepes, fill them with a cream-cheese filling, fry them again in butter, and bake them in a casserole dish! It's a lot of work, but they are really good, and quite different from just plain crepes! We ate them with berry jam and powdered sugar. Yum.

We learned to make challah. We especially liked doing a four-strand braid with the dough!

We usually try to have a sort of Passover Dinner on the Thursday before Easter—not a real Seder meal, but kind of a modified Seder where we talk about some of the Passover symbols. I usually make a Seder plate and we try to eat some kind of lamb! This year we got take-out from an Indian restaurant we like; Lamb Coconut Kurma. It was so good, maybe we'll do that every year! :) I made tzatziki to go with it.

We built a little sukkah, open to the stars, for Sukkot or the Feast of Tabernacles. This is a fall harvest festival, and the Jews eat and sleep in their little huts! That sounds so fun! We just ate in ours.

We also got to go on a really fun field trip where we saw a model of the Ancient Old Testament tabernacle. It was put on at a stake center, and they had a little video connecting the ancient temple to modern-day temples, and showing some symbols that are common to both. It was really interesting! Then we got to walk around the life-size model of the tabernacle, from the outer courts all the way into the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, where we could see the Ark of the Covenant. It was really cool to get a sense of how big everything was and how it was set up and put together. The picture above is taken by the altar of sacrifice in the inner courtyard.

Here is the Holy Place (the skies were really beautiful while we were there!)

The big menorah in the Holy Place. The shewbread was in the part too.

And this is inside the Holy of Holies, during a sudden downpour—it was so snug and cozy in there with the rain pounding down! The ark of the covenant had the tablets that held the Ten Commandments, some manna, and the Rod of Aaron inside.