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!