For this KONOS unit we are using their
Africa in a Bag unit where the units are more planned out for you. Although these activities are from weeks 1 & 2 of the curriculum, we actually took a LOT longer than that to do them. In the curriculum they give you a number of choices of activities to choose from and we tend to want to do most of them and also have homeschool coops that we belong to (so we don't do KONOS activities those days) so it takes us a lot longer than their suggested time frame. Anyhoo, here are pictures of some of the things we did.
The 1st week we focused on Stewardship in general, the Sahara Desert, Egypt, & Alexander the Great. We learned about the desert's array of animals, including the gecko. So, one of the suggested activities was to play gecko tag where everyone is a gecko and has a "tail" (bandanna tucked into thei
r pants) and then they have to pull off each others' tails (don't worry they learned that they grow back) and then you are it if your tail is pulled off. It was a lot of fun and wore me out!
We made a Stewardship chart to keep track of the different areas of Stewardship and how our kids are doing in that area and then they will focus each week on a different area and see if they can improve in that area. So, Joseph's life from the Bible was a good example of being a faithful steward. And the kids got to try and make mud bricks, both with straw and without to see the importance of adding the straw and relating it to Pharaoh making the Israelites gather their own straw as well as make the bricks in Exodus 5. And the kids could definitely tell the difference. They also got to play with mud so that is always fun!
We also made pyramids (their own version) with sugar cubes and frosting. This was a little more difficult than they thought especially when you only have so many sugar cubes and they taste so yummy! :) Bella mostly just put the frosting on the cubes and then proceeded to lick it off!
Here the kids are making clay cartouches of their names in hieroglyphics. First we went to an
online website where we typed in their names and printed them off and then they tried to engrave their clay with those symbols for their cartouche.
We also read about what pharaohs would put into their pyramids
and made paper pyramids and drew pictures inside of what might be found there. Africa in a Bag also includes a large black outline map of Africa where they have you label it with the different countries, the mountain ranges, the type of vegetation for different areas, and little replicas of things like a felt shaped pyramid or a small black stone for the Rosetta Stone.
The 2nd week our focus was on being good stewards of the gospel, Islam, the Tuareg
, and some international relations between North Africa & the Middle East. So, we kept track of how we were doing with sharing the gospel on our chart. And the kids got dressed up as Tuaregs, made a Tuareg shield from cardboard and painted it to resemble Oryx Antelope hides after looking at pictures of them and dramatized their life and learned about their religion. They learned some of the basic principles of Islam and what the Bible has to say about those teachings and looked at a picture of a mosque online. They read about the Suez Canal and the Aswan High Dam and how it
affected the area. By the time we were done with these "2 weeks" it was time for our Christmas studies and Christmas break. We did have a 1 week
Lego unit study along side a
Nutcracker unit study in there too (since Sam & I were going to go to the Nutcracker and I thought Jake would enjoy the Lego unit). Then after Christmas we continued with Africa again which I will post next with "week 4".
