Adventures of a KY schoolmarm: Ancient China

Chapter 10 in SOTW covered Ancient China. I thought Madeline would be a little bit more excited about this section since we have been eating more rice lately and also because some of her favorite food is Chinese chicken nuggets, aka sweet and sour chicken. She liked the activities but didn't seem too concerned with the facts.

We did, however, learn that silk was first discovered in China by the empress, Lei Zu, when a silkworm dropped into her cup of tea, and we also read a story about a young boy named Chin who worked hard with his father to manage their rice fields. He stood in cold, ankle deep water and bent down all day to tend to the rice. The work was hard and he felt proud of himself at the end of the day.

The first activity Maddie accomplished was making her own pictogram. Early Chinese writing used words that look like pictures. Picto means "picture" and gram means "writing". I found a fun Chinese pictogram worksheet here. Madeline practiced the drawings on the worksheet and then set out to create her own. It was suggested to paint the pictograms in black ink, but as Madeline says, "It's my pictogram painting, and I want it to be colorful." So be it. I think this ended up turning into just random little paintings, but she had fun with it. After her painting was all dry, I asked her what each pictogram stood for, and I had a good giggle watching her decide what the picture should be.

Since she has been interested in playing computer games lately, I was very happy to find this pictogram game on pbskids. It kept her occupied for a little while.

The next activity, which ended up taking a ridiculous amount of time, was to make our own ming bowls. The only reason I say it took so long was because we had to exchange more clay as the first batch was not pliable at all, even after I added a little water to it. So back to the store I went. I ended up just getting a small tub of Crayola air-dry clay, which had just enough clay for both kids to make a bowl. Once we finally had usable material, go figure that it rained for a couple days, leaving us to air dry in the house instead of out in the sun. I didn't think that would add that much time to the drying process, but it took a good 2 days even though the clay on the bowl was pretty thin. During that time, Madeline and I did a google image search to see photos of ming bowls. When everything was finally dry and ready to go, we took it all outside to paint blue designs.

Ming bowls also make really awesome hats, in case you were wondering. :-)

These were molded around our regular bowls covered in plastic wrap.

Madeline and Travis decided to paint the inside solid blue and decorate the outside with random designs. Again, as Madeline says, "it's her ming bowl to decorate how she likes." Travis got bored while painting (that's a first), and Madeline became distracted by rescuing a non-flying lightning bug. She then had to build a habitat for the little guy in hopes of saving him.

After getting the lightning bug's habitat in order, she finished off her ming bowl by painting pictograms on the outer part. Travis requested a swirly, so mama painted that on his bowl. Tomorrow, we will finally finish the bowls by adding a glaze of glue/water with added glitter to make them fancier!