Tuesday, September 18, 2007

I'll Bet the Romans Didn't Have It This Hard!

As you can see in the photo above, we've been studying the Romans! This is Keller, Ella, and James dressed in their Roman togas when the kids opened their Roman restaurant. We had a blast! We served simple foods like plums, cheese, soup, and bread. James and I had to pay for our dinner with "Roman coins".
The following week, we took a stab at making our Roman aqueduct. The photo above is the very messy sand dough that we had to cook first.


Keller and Ella, putting scrollwork on their aqueducts.



After we shaped the aqueducts, they had to be baked. Here they are, coming out of the oven!


Disaster! One of the aqueduct bridges fell down and we tried several times to repair it, but it was no use.


After many attempts with the sand dough, we settled on building blocks! Here's a very happy Keller with his halfway done aqueduct.


Success! We put the "pipe" on the top, and the "holding tank" down below, and poured water through it, hoping for the best.

Here is a live shot of the aqueduct and the enthusiasm:
Our Aqeduct Video
We started this project at about 1pm. It wasn't working until about 4:30! This took way longer than I predicted. The beauty of homeschool though, is that if something isn't working, you can always try something else. I hope the kids learned a lot even though we failed at first. Keller said "I bet the Romans didn't have it this hard!"
Until later,
Kristy