Historyetc Very Early China and West Africa

Still following Story of the World, we did the Anansi Spider stories, African ‘tribal art’ [re-imagined] and shaker instruments and from the early china we thought about the discovery of silk and chopsticks, ate a rice dish, drank jasmine tea and made a ‘silk’ bag to store our ‘jade’ pictograms in

It was a rather fabulous day! obviously, having had such a killer migraine yesterday, i did far less planning than i had thought i might, and after all, i was at work [as blogged, woohoo, by daddybean] . I think we were 2 crafts short of an ideal number, tho we did have 1 of them, but at the point ppl were mooching around, i had forgotten about it. An Jax has come up with the fab idea of doing a costume pegdoll at each historyetc, so we should end up with hundreds of them to have a clothes timeline washingline!

We started with the early african crafts, doing tribal designs to make a variety of shakers. All the children seemed to enjoy this, and less mess was made than anticipated the children were also excited by the fact that this also necessitated buying some more pringles which were on a buy one get one free across the road Whilst they did this, i read some stories from these books

We also made little spiders to be Anansi and hung them from the vine – which did look rather fab Lots of giggling and laughing and chatting amonsgst the children. Too many adults had headaches, so we smiled and chatted and drank tea as well as educating, found the oboe to lend out, hopefully still in working order more or less

We had lunch and in the afternoon I explained about this time of the chinese dynasty the story of the empress ‘finding’ silk and then we mde ‘silk’ bags to put jade pictograms in to tell each other’s fortunes. the children pretty much chose loads and loads of hideous fortunes so in the end we adults were not so keen to have our fortunes told any more. We made some papaya fried rice and drank the jasmine tea and ate lots of cake. J and M read us further stories, and that seemed good too.

Jax is staying overnight, so we have a yummy curry and are trying not to hear the kids screeching upstairs whilst we serially blog [or are we in parallel??]

SB has also done some piano prac, been to brownies [and is going to be walking with the flag bearer on remembrance day] and judo. BB and Big have also had great fun on the wii.