June 15, 2022
Today, we started a new season of The House of Fun - Isolation time. We are all COVID positive - so we have to stay positive. Ahah. This time I had no longer a 3.5 year old, but a 2.5 and a 6 year old. Wow.
We've been travelling in space and time, visiting the treasures and life of ancient Egypt. Then we talked about minerals and we ended up in Paris, at Louvre. All of this because of a geometric solid called pyramid.
We started - as usual - from cereal boxes. I prepared and cut the box as in these images.
And then I gave the shapes to my kids to colour in and decorate as they liked.
We learnt that a pyramid is made by 4 triangles and 1 square, that depending on the side you look at it, it can appear as a triangle or as a square. And we talked about this shape being used in architecture, since ancient Egypt (I used a kid book about ancient Egypt to support this activity, in italian) to modern times (I looked for the picture of the Louvre pyramid, Paris). My daughter remembered we can find this shape in nature, in minerals, so she took the mineral book (from the same series as that of ancient Egypt) and we started looking for geometric solids. We learnt not all pyramids have a square base, and that two identical pyramids with square base joint through their base make up an octahedron.
We had good fun seeing that quartz (a mineral) grows in a shape similar to an obelisk (built in ancient Egypt, but also by Romans, Assyrians and others).
We read about Egyptians, how their life depended on the Nile flooding cycle, how they worshipped cats and other animals. We saw drawings of big blocks of stones being transported on ships through the Nile to build pyramids. We learnt they wrote using hieroglyphs, that very few people knew how to write, and those people were at highest levels of wealth and social status. We learnt many more interesting things. We also learnt that in Turin - not far from where our grandparents live - we have the second most important and biggest museum about ancient Egypt, after the one in Egypt. We'll definitely go when we'll get to visit.
We concluded by building a pyramid with Lego.
It has a cat - as we know in ancient Egypt people just loved cats. They also loved to party, though we were not sure they had icecream and pizza.
Learning outcomes:
geometric solids
some ancient history
shape awareness
Materials: ruler or set square, a pen, cereal box, colours, scissors and sticky tape