Regency Unit, and writing a Regency letter

It is terribly sad, but Daisy is graduating from our homeschool and going to college in the Fall! I feel it more keenly than with the older boys, because by this age the boys had mostly disengaged already, either going to public school or doing outside classes and hardly ever joining our family school. But Daisy has valiantly participated to the very end, doing the activities with us and even sitting through our read-aloud books whenever she is able. It is wonderful to have her with us. She brings the kind of enthusiasm that makes me a better teacher. So, I will be VERY SAD to have her go (and she says she will still join us when she can—but I know it won't be often now), and in her honor I let her choose anything she wanted to study for our last unit with her.

She chose, wonderfully, to study The Regency Era. What a great unit! I was very excited about it. For our purposes we chose to study the longer time period (many people classify the whole period from 1795-1837 as Regency-era, even though the Prince Regent was only officially in power in England from 1811-1820). It encompasses so much great stuff. The French Revolution! The early American Republic! Beethoven and Napoleon! And of course, Jane Austen.

For Public Relations purposes, I called this unit "The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars" when talking to the little boys. And "The Regency Era" when talking to the girls. Thus, everyone was happy.

We learned about lots of people and events as part of this unit, and then we also took as our inspiration some of the expected accomplishments of a well-bred young lady of the era. One day we made quill pens and learned how to write with pen and ink. The older kids also practiced some types of penmanship of the time period, notably "copperplate" (roundhand) and Italian hand. I got each of the girls an inexpensive fountain pen to use. I love fountain pens!

Here are some relevant links:

https://herreputationforaccomplishment.wordpress.com/2015/05/06/anatomy-of-a-regency-letter/ Writing a letter, how to fold a letter

https://herreputationforaccomplishment.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/minums-for-handwriting-practice/ handwriting

https://books.google.com/books?id=GAVQAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false handwriting practice and samples

https://herreputationforaccomplishment.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/rules-for-writing-long-and-short-s-in-jane-austens-era/ the Long S

We already had sealing wax (from our American Revolution unit, maybe?) and were happy to have an excuse to get it out again. Malachi uses sealing wax as a matter of course on all his correspondance, actually, so it was readily at hand.

(Clementine had been going around doing all her sisters' hair throughout this activity, and eventually we took a picture of them all coiffed by her handiwork):

Daisy's writing

Junie's writing

Goldie's lovely (left-handed!) writing

Clementine drew some gnomes and a Caw with the fountain pen. Not bad!

This was Ziggy writing in some other language, I believe

Egyptian Feast and Treasure Hunt

This celebration was so much fun. While planning it, I found so many awesome ideas that I DIDN'T want to do (complicated/expensive/time-consuming)—elaborate parties like this—but I had a lot of fun browsing around anyway. And luckily, I was able to compile enough fairly simple things from those resources, that we were able to have a great time! You can find a lot of the ideas we didn't use on my Pinterest Board.

The children dressed up in Egyptian costumes and wore all their jewelry (well…the girls did, anyway). And here was our menu (complete with totally inauthentic "hieroglyphs" and lame "Papyrus" font):

We love hummus and I make it fairly often, but anytime I run out of tahini, it takes me a long time to get again since I often don't see it at the regular grocery store. So, I was happy to find this recipe for hummus without tahini. I think I just needed…permission, or approval, or something, to do this. Because it's perfectly fine without tahini! Really good, in fact! I put in some sesame oil to see if I could get some of that sesame taste back, and I think a little peanut butter might also be good…or even sesame seeds!

The "yogurt Thoth" is just a joke for the older boys because they always joked that the god Thoth sounded like someone trying to say "sauce" with a lisp. Really it was labneh (sort of like a really thick yogurt cheese?), which we love almost as much as hummus with our pita bread. Or naan. Yum!

And Pie of Horus! My own invention! Not the pie, just the name. I had been wanting to make a pink lemonade ice cream pie and this celebration night seemed just the time. I was very pleased with myself for calling it Pie of Horus, as it seemed to strike just the right note. Ha ha.

It really was a most lavish feast! And I even got gold plastic plates for the occasion. So fancy!

But the very BEST thing I did for this party was have Abraham (my 14-year-old) be in charge of a treasure hunt. I knew we should have some sort of hunting-for-ancient-treasure activity, and Abe is so great with that sort of thing! He made it so fun, with coded hieroglyphs and riddles in the clues, and the younger kids LOVED it.

Hunting for treasure!

Totally clueless. But thrilled.

Abe hid the treasure-filled sarcophagi in the shed.

Inside, I had wrapped up stuffed animals like mummies, in toilet paper. (This was quite fun to do. You have to be really gentle with your wrapping or it will tear, but I found it strangely satisfying.) I drew faces on the front of them, like you'd find on a sarcophagus.

Each person's favorite animal! Oh…you can't tell what they are? Ha ha. I should have had Sam draw them. Penguin, elephant, monkey, bear, pig, owl.

I had used a gold-foil tablecloth to wrap up these "sarcophagi" made from cardboard boxes, with appropriately dire warnings for those who disturbed the treasure. If you can't do this during your Ancient Egypt Unit, when CAN you do it? One of the boxes was also filled with gold chocolate coins, and other candy "jewels." The children thought it was all so exciting and fun!

And then we watched "Prince of Egypt" while we ate our pie. It was a great end to our Ancient Egypt Unit!

Making Egyptian jewelry

There are many, many good ideas out there for making Ancient Egypt-style jewelry! And we tried several of them. I never thought I would voluntarily have my children do an art project involving spray-painted macaroni, for example, but we found these cool-looking snake-y cuffs to make…and then the variant looked so pretty here…that I swallowed my objections! Anything is better with gold spray-paint, it seems. (And we went through a couple cans of it during this unit!)

Here's a page showing how to make Egyptian collars. A variation is here. We used lids to some take-out containers we had, since they were a little flatter than paper plates, but either would work. You can just use anything you have on hand to decorate them (if you balk at macaroni…ha ha) and we have a huge box of these jewel-y sort of things, so that's mostly what we used.

Maybe my favorite thing we made were these circlets with the royal serpent sign. (This same site shows a pretty variation on the armlets/cuffs.) They are just so simple and elegant, I think. The girls could not WAIT to wear them for our Egyptian celebration!

The boys liked wearing theirs too. But real Pharaohs don't smile, of course.

Here is my very favorite collar—the one Sebastian made. It looks geometric and cool, but upon closer examination you can see it is a road- and sign-themed piece of jewelry. Sebastian, as you may remember, really loves roads and road signs, so…naturally…he would make his Ancient Egyptian jewelry reflect this interest. You can see he has included: stop signs and yield signs, flashing "caution" lights, lane lines, bridges, and an impressive array of every type of common traffic light including the "left turn on arrow only" versions.

Oh, Sebastian. How I love that boy.

Making Egyptian Amulets

We saw this idea about how to make an Egyptian amulet (hint: you just use air-dry clay, ha ha) and knew it would be a fun project. We had just been listening to a P.G. Wodehouse audiobook (this one, to be precise) which featured, quite prominently, a stolen Egyptian scarab (of the 4th Dynasty), so the children were all quite pleased to be able to make our OWN scarabs.

The air-dry clay isn't the MOST sturdy of media to work with, but it was at least easy to mold, and we all liked our finished amulets. Malachi may have liked his lucky owl most of all. He wore it around for several weeks and said it brought him great power and good fortune.

Sebby's monkey amulet (or "monkulet")

Junie's bunny

Some ankhs and a scarab.

Making and using papyrus

One thing I remember pretty clearly from my grade-school years is the time I made my own "papyrus" for a school project. I don't remember it all THAT clearly, I guess, but I do remember that I used iris leaves, and it took a lot of experimentation to get them soft enough—seems like maybe I ended up using the blender? And then baking the sheets in the oven?—and it never really turned into great paper. But it was fun, I remember that! For this unit, though, I wasn't really planning on trying to make paper because we had done it recently when learning about Japan.

But…while we were gathering the reeds for our reed boats, we found some of these nice wide-leaved water plants which seemed like they might be kind of like papyrus…because they had white pulpy stuff inside, and seemed buoyant. So, we decided just to experiment a bit.

With real papyrus, you'd scoop out the pulp and just use that for your paper, I think. But we just wove the whole reeds into a kind of mat and then pounded it with a mallet. Seb quite enjoyed that part.

It got all pulpy and you could see the fibers sort of fuse together as it dried.

And once it was fully dry, it was possible to write on our "papyrus"…though not really easy. Still, it was fun to visualize the process a little better by doing this activity.

I also ordered some actual papyrus so the children could see and feel what it was like. Much nicer than our "homemade" version, of course! And it was fun to write on it with brushes. We attempted to write our names using hieroglyphs, though the more we learned about that written language, the more we realized how complicated it was and how we didn't really "get" it with our letter-for-letter Western view of things! Still…fun to try it.

Here's an overview of the Egyptian numbering system we used, too.