Tuesday, August 24, 2010

First Day of School - 2010

We started our day with our "breakfast out at Denny's" tradition. Yay for breakfast out!

Then we went to Target and spent a happy hour picking out school supplies. Rather than do this before school starts, we like to make it part of the first day. The children were *so* excited at my generosity. When they would ask, "can I get this?" and I would say, "yes!", they would invariably respond "REALLY????" (I must say no more than I think!) (oh, and despite my generosity I'm sure that I spent less than if they were all in building school and we had gone to the store with 5 different supply lists!)

We came home with our new supplies and the children decorated covers for their history notebooks that we will use all year. I told them to draw and color pictures of what they thought we'd be learning about this year.


We ended up with 3 pyramid pictures, a very detailed picture of the Ten Commandments, and a 4 part masterpiece by our daughter showing Moses, the pyramids, a Roman soldier, and a horse and cart on a Roman road.


Then we read about the Nile River and began working on our cookie dough maps of Egypt! Egypt has a rather funky shape, with a little triangle sticking off a top corner, so that was a bit tricky for a few of the children, but they all did a fabulous job. Here are their "during" and "after" pictures. You will notice in the after pics that the dough spread out during baking and the shape wasn't quite as distinct as before. Still delicious though! For more on how we decorate and bake our cookie dough maps, please go here.



We found these awesome gold colored sprinkles that were just perfect for the desert!



And we talked a lot about "Upper Egypt" being on the bottom part of the country when looking at a map (due to its higher elevation) and "Lower Egypt" being the top part of the map because it's lower in elevation there. That was hard for Little Man to understand at first.






When my husband asked the children later what they had learned about the Nile River that they didn't know before, here is what they said:

Little Man: "It grows a reed that they make paper out of......(long pause)...it's called pa-pa-papyrus."

Son C: "The Nile River was very important to Egypt."

Son L: "There's a measuring post where they measure how high the flood crests are."

Son G: "It goes through 8 other countries besides Egypt and is the longest river in the world."

Daughter G: "When the Nile overflowed each year it left silt behind which was good for growing crops."

Pretty good learning for the first day!

8 comments:

Beth in Texas said...

I was thinking this was FB again and I was going to "like" this post. LOL We didn't get our cookie dough maps done but that's a long sad story. We should get them done tomorrow.

Joelle said...

This looks great! I bet everyone enjoyed eating them. We made one our of salt dough last week. It was fun to make.

votemom said...

i love your first day traditions!!!

lazy susie said...

I love your first days! Tell your children that their pictures are fabulous! I'm very impressed.

lahbluebonnet said...

Wow! You did all that in one day! My kids could take a week to do the cookie! Looks like y'all are off to a great start!
Blessings,
Laurie

CAB said...

Awesome - it's been too long since I visited your blog - we start after Labor Day - the breakfast out tradition sounds awesome! What a fun, happy way to start things off! Do you do all subjects the first day?? I need to go read some more....

Patti said...

Oh I like this idea VERY much! We are already 2 weeks in (TOG Y1) but I think we are going to try the cookie dough maps. My kids will LOVE this! Thanks!

Laura said...

Thank you for the wonderful idea of a cookie dough map. We made our Egypt maps today and followed your examples and my girls all loved it! The most fun "first day" we have had so far. Thank you!!!!