Rangoli Designs from Ancient India

Our class's completed Rangoli designs are on our "Think Tank" board.
Rangoli designs were made using colored chalk and they were drawn at the front of the house to welcome guests. It was a complex process. Below is Remi who is drawing the dots for the grid of the design.

They have connect the dots using their pencils to create their design.

Once their designs are sketched using the pencil, they got chalk to make their designs colorful.

This is Marisa's completed Rangoli design.

The design below belongs to Hays.

Hands with Henna

Ancient India is where we are currently exploring. We learned about henna or "mehendi" which they used to decorate their hands, arms, and feet. We all traced our own hands and made our own designs of "henna" on our hands.

Analiese is hard at work!

Will takes a second to admire his work.

Maxine is super proud of her work!

A close up of Gabrielle's henna hand.

Here is Kiyomi's hand with henna.

Egypt Tic Tac Toe Board

Students were given a tic tac toe board this week with all kinds of activities relating to ancient Egypt. They could make an amulet, ankh, postcard, write an article for The Daily Mummy, interview a pharaoh, write a story about the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, critical thinking activities, creating a new god/goddess and writing the legend behind it. Phew....what a ton of fun! The pictures posted here are students working on their choices.
Above is Maxine working on her postcard.
Below is Gabrielle working on one of the critical thinking activities.
Josie and Ian are both writing questions that they would ask King Khufu if they could interview him.
Nicholas is working on his amulet.

Walk Like an Egyptian

In art today we made our pharaoh headdress. We worked with a partner and added all of the bells and whistles. Look how creative we are! At the bottom is our group shot.

Pyramids In Egypt

We started our ancient civilizations unit with Ancient Egypt. We learned that pyramids were used as tombs for pharaohs. They were able to bring trinkets and items into their tombs with them for use in the afterlife. We decorated our pyramids and before we sealed them up we created a few trinkets that we would want to have in the afterlife and sealed them inside. Pictured above is all of our pyramids.

Maxine said that her trinkets were a picture of her family, her IPOD, and her stuffed rabbit.

Luke M brought a baseball and a picture of his family.

Payton brought her headdress, necklace, and a bracelet.

Josie brought her DS, picture of her hamster, and her piggy bank.

Advertisements and Letters in Social Studies

We just finished learning about Sumerians in Mesopotamia. They were a very advanced society and had many important inventions/innovations. A few examples are the wheel, the arch, and using wind energy in the form of a sail. Students were given the option to either make an advertisement for one of these inventions or write a letter to somebody living today from a Sumerian talking about their daily life. Above is Luke M's letter, below are Nathan's, Remi's,Shradha's, and Anusha's.

Ziggurats

In class we made ziggurats out of Legos. They were used by the Mesopotamian people as temples. They were made out of mud-bricks and had many different levels. Remember- you can click on a picture to enlarge it and look at the details of each group's ziggurat.

Cuneiform

In Social Studies this week we are working on Mesopotamia. We learned about Sumer, the land between rivers. We talked about the Tigris and the Euphrates. We also learned about how they became a civilization. They were such an advanced civilization, that they had to come up with a system of record keeping to keep up with their business. They invented pictographs- which are a way of using pictures to express a word or idea. This progressed into cuneiform which was their way of writing. We wrote a sentence with our table, turned it into our own examples of cuneiform, and then carved it into clay. We had a great time!