Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Awesome History Round III: Awesome Modern History

 I am so far behind blogging!  We started  Awesome History two weeks ago!

We are continuing A Child's History of the World by Virgil M Hillyer, picking up where we left off last semester, and we'll finish the book this semester.

Our first class was chapters 67-69, which covered Protestants, Queen Elizabeth, and Shakespeare.

Our art activity  and our active activity were a performance of a simplified Midsummer Night's Dream with Choclo playing Bottom.

We did  fruit, bread, and home made cottage cheese for our snack.

I hadn't really thought about it, but cottage cheese is called that because it's the kind of cheese that's easy to make at home (as opposed to cheddar or brie which require specialized skills).

The next week we did chapters 70-72, covering slavery, Cromwell, and Louis XIII and XIV.

For our active activity we did ninepins, a classic game from that time and a precursor to bowling.  We used empty water bottles as pins, and a small ball (a tennis ball would work well).  We set up a little alley in the front hall which helped keep the ball from going wild and ensured that even the littlest kids knocked over pins!
 For our art activity, we made golden sun masks like King Louis XIV, the "Sun King."

We cut our masks out of regular paper plates (really young kids drew them, with adults helping to cut them out).

I then spray painted them gold (outside!).  The genius of this is that the paint absorbs into the paper, so it dries practically instantly.

Then we taped them onto straws as holders.

For our snack, we did a fancy tea with chocolate Madeleines.

I've been making Madeleines for a while now- ever since my friend Rose gave me a set of pans and a Madeleine cookbook as a birthday present- but I hadn't tried chocolate.

My conclusion is that I just like Madeleines!

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