Ancient Rome.

It always starts with reading a book. And since we read a lot in this house, the girls are wonderful at coming up with different ideas and entertaining themselves.

Today we were reading a book about ancient Rome. It's a book for a bit older kids, but we managed to sit for a while and go through a couple of pages before Ivana and Leona were ready to do a fun activity. First, we came across the page where they described how Romans were using the mosaics to decorate their homes and there was a suggestion to try to make a paper mosaic. I did not have to ask my girls twice. Off we moved to the table and started cutting the construction paper. Ivana wanted to make a tree and Leona settled for the fish I drew for her. We picked three colors not to make the project too long, but still to have a nice colorful picture.

It turned out to be a very time consuming project. Leona did not have the patience to finish her design up, and Ivana was ready to give up half way. But I'm trying to teach our oldest to finish what she'd started and I offered her my help. The project was coming along faster when we decided to stop putting glue on each separate square of paper, but instead put glue on the design itself and then quickly arranged the squares. Ivana's interest in finishing up returned as she was able to see the result faster, as at her age the project is mostly about the result. She did a great job and later showed it to Tata with pride.

Then we read up a bit more on the Romans, and the the girls wanted to have their lunch lying down, like the Romans. It was not going to happen, however I allowed them to have their banana snack the Romans' way. But first, Ivana asked me for a bed sheet so she could really look like a Roman woman wearing her toga and sandals.

We went for a walk and Ivana picked some kind of dried plants to try and make the papyrus. She let the stems soak in the water for a while and then tried to weave them together. Of course it did not work, she was a bit disappointed but quickly get over it and comforted herself saying that one day she'd go to Egypt and get that special plant to make the papyrus (we'd watched a program about ancient Egypt a couple of days prior and they'd mentioned the papyrus making process).

In the afternoon we sat down to do our writing exercise with Ivana and continued with our theme of the day. She wrote these sentences:
-Ancient Romans decorated their houses with mosaics.
-The Romans spoke a language called Latin.
-The Romans wrote on papyrus.
-At parties the Romans ate lying down.
-The Romans wore sandals and togas.

That's why we love to read books as they can be extremely inspiring and help to create an all day learning experience without any formal setting, in a natural and fun way.