Ancient History, Week 20

The Phoenicians & The Assyrians

There weren't many additional resources for either the Phoenicians or the Assyrians, so we took the opportunity to play catch-up and combined the two since we're a couple of weeks behind schedule.

I don't know why it has taken me this many months to notice, but History Odyssey's dictionary words don't align particularly well with Usborne: Ancient World, our chosen spine. Tessa has been dutifully looking up and copying definitions, but the words are rarely ever used within the text we read. I haven't been all that thrilled with our children's dictionary either, so we are scrapping the dictionary words for the remainder of the year. This small tweak will streamline our schedule too. We will essentially be able to shave off a day of history each week!


Monday

• Read Usborne: Ancient World by Fiona Chandler (pages 40-41).
• Completed HO map work for Lesson 16, Main Lesson.

Wednesday

• Read "Dido and Aeneas" from Roman Myths and Legends by Andrew Masters.
• Completed "Make Purple Dye" and "Use Phoenician Dye to Make a Colored Pasta Necklace" from the SOTW activity guide.

The Phoenicians crushed murex shells to create the purple dye they were famous for. I boiled down a head of red cabbage to achieve a similar effect. Tessa dyed pasta and a pair of socks. We were surprised how pretty the shade of purple turned out. Tessa was enthralled with the entire process and wanted to create more colors of dye from other vegetables.

Tessa modeled a completed purple pasta necklace while stringing another.

Thursday

• Read Usborne: Ancient World by Fiona Chandler (pages 42-45).
• Completed HO map work for Lesson 17, Main Lesson.

Friday

• Read Gilgamesh the King by Ludmila Zeman.
• Read The Last Quest of Gilgamesh by Ludmila Zeman.
• Completed draw and color.

There is a third book (the second of the series) in The Gilgamesh Trilogy entitled The Revenge of Ishtar. Sadly, our library doesn't have it. I kind of wish I would have bought a copy to round out the story. Tessa enjoyed them more than I thought she would.

* HO = History Odyssey