A Unit Study on Ancient Rome
Objective: My daughter requested a tour of the ancient world. The second stop was ancient Rome, which we tied in to St. Valentine since it was also Valentine's Day this month. While exploring the ancient world, we wanted to examine some myths, and learn about some of their contributions to science, math and the arts. I create daily worksheets dealing with the days topic and a daily chore. My daughter gets five or six questions while my son gets three or four. I include questions about the activity of the day and if there is room, either math (simple equations or word problems) or language arts questions (like rhyme, syllables, synonyms).
Spelling List and Sentence of the Week for K/1st grader:
Language Arts lessons include some simple questions about the spelling list, like finding the nouns, making rhymes or counting syllables. We read and write our sentence of the week every weekday.
Love, Heart, Red, Pink, White, Pretty, Rome, Volcano, Jupiter, Mars
Venus is pretty.
Cupid shoots arrows.
Bees can sting.
Argus has one hundred eyes.
Myths:
Every week we read a myth and did an activity based around the myth. We began with two stories of the founding of Rome. We read from Geraldine McCaughrean's Roman Myths. The first few stories tie together into a simplified version of the Aeneid. We began in Olympus, with Jupiter hiring Ganymede to be the cup bearer to the gods and promising to make Troy famous for a little while. The second story brought us to the love triangle of Venus, Vulcan and Mars. The jealousy wrought here led Venus to fall in love with the mortal Anchises and their child Aeneas. The next story brought about the fall of Troy. As Troy fell, Aeneas woke up to witness the fires and chaos. He managed to save his son and father, but his wife died in the city. They took his boat and set sail, a dream telling him to head to Italy. Although Juno tried to sink the boat, Neptune saved them and the boat came ashore in Carthage. Aeneas became distracted in Carthage with the beauty of Dido, but the gods reminded him of his important mission and he left. With a slight detour to the hells, he landed in Italy.
Time went by, and eventually twins were born of an ancestor of Aeneas, a Vestal virgin and the god Mars. The two boys were abandoned and raised by wolves for a time before some shepherds found them. The two boys grew and began to build a city, but constantly fought. Their fighting eventually led to the death of Remus. After this epic tale, we thought about what types of things we would want in our city and used Legos to design an city of our own, including parks, zoos, and dinosaur robots.
Our next myth led us to the story of Pygmalion. We read a summary, but also enjoyed Aphrodite the Diva from the Goddess Girls series. The Pygmalion interpretation was fun, but we also got to take a trip with the Greek goddesses into Egypt to meet some of the Egyptian goddesses. We used Model Magic to create our own mini sculptures of people. We like Model Magic because its less sticky then some other clay and dries easily. Plus its fun to color and create marbled designs. Our people didn't last long, as we enjoyed making other things out of our clay after that.
The kids of our church chose to help and study a local bee farm, which tied in great with a myth about bees and Jupiter. So after the church lesson on bees, we read the story about bees asking Jupiter for a stinger. The bee had grown tired of all the people and animals stealing his honey. He took some honey to Jupiter to ask for help. After taking a taste, Jupiter and Juno agreed to help but at a price. Bees would be given a stinger, but at the cost of its life. We planted some wildflower seeds in the hope that we too would be seeing some bees.
For our final myth, we read the story of Argus of the one hundred eyes. One of the many times Juno was jealous of Jupiter, she sent Argus to watch over Jupiter's most recent girlfriend. With his hundred eyes, she thought no one would ever sneak by but Mercury played sweet music until every eye fell asleep. Once asleep, Mercury killed him with a stone. In tribute to him, Juno transferred his eyes to the beautiful peacock. We looked at peacock feathers, and the Turkish art inspired by them. The beautiful blue colors and layers of circles. We created our own circle art.
Math:
At least once a week, our math activities would tie in with a different theme from ancient Rome. Our first activity was by far my daughter's favorite. We read Fun with Roman Numerals by David Adler. We practiced identifying some Roman numerals and then made some addition and subtraction problems with them. She loved it and wanted more all month. It was great fun.
After Roman numerals, we read a book about time and the the different types of clocks. I suggested we try to make a sundial, drawing our shadow standing at the same point at different times in the day. It's a great way to study light and shadow while studying time, but they weren't interested. They saw a water clock in the book and had to make that instead. So we used some old plastic bottles to create our own water clock, timing how long it took for the water to drain from one bottle into another, then repeating. It gave us the chance to talk about seconds and minutes as we watched the timer.
We continued are discussion of time by looking at the calendar. We talked about the creation of months, and how they are about the same length as a lunar cycle. We discussed how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the sun, and how that could be divided. Julius Caesar proposed a new calendar for Rome called the Julian calendar which moved away from the old Roman calendar which was more rooted in lunar design and would add a random month to try to keep the seasons aligned properly. After having spent time in Egypt, he spoke with others who agreed that a year should be 365.25 days based on the sun. The Julian calendar slowly spread throughout the empire, and although it would eventually be replaced by the Gregorian calendar in much of the world, it is still used in a few places. It was also fun to look at the names of the months in the old calendar and try to guess which month they are in today's calendar. Martius becomes March and Aprilis becomes April for example.
We finished our ancient Roman math lessons by making an abacus out of pipe cleaners and beads. We decided it could look any way we wanted it to, after having looked at a few examples. We talked about place value and decided we could use a separate pipe cleaner for each column. We kept is simple with a ones, a tens, and a hundreds column. The kids liked moving the beads up and down, but thought that it was faster to count and write things down.
Art:
We began our exploration of Roman art by first looking at what the average Roman would look like. My daughter drew a picture as we read, starting with the sandals they would typically wear. We moved up to the chiton or toga and finally read about their makeup. We discussed how rich Roman women were often more worried about their looks than their health, using lead to make their face pale despite some understanding of the dangers. My daughter thought it was funny that they would try to make their eyebrows meet in the middle, since most people today want them to be separate. She added rogue and eye color, as was standard. She really wanted to paint their lips red, but lipstick was an Egyptian cosmetic that did not gain much popularity in Rome.
After exploring dress and make up, we moved onto architecture. We looked at many standard buildings and then spent time exploring the Colosseum. We discussed how it was mostly used for gladiatorial contests, but the most amazing thing to happen in the Colosseum may have been the mock sea battles. It's amazing to think of the hard work involved in filling the building with water and getting boats inside.
We found some great examples of Roman metalwork sculpture. We took some aluminum foil to create our own art. At first, we tried to shape the aluminum foil to try to create a person, but after several struggles, we decided to try cutting out forms and making paper doll style aluminum foil people in the same poses of some of the sculptures. Then we played some sculpture freeze dance. We danced to some music, but when the music stopped, we had to freeze in the pose of the next sculpture.
Our final venture into the world or Roman art lead us to two different techniques that Romans liked to use to decorate their house. Romans liked sculptures decorating their houses, but also loved mosaics and frescos to decorate their houses. Michaels often has plaster mosaic kits that my kids love. My success in making plaster varies. Sometimes it's too wet and takes forever to dry, and other times it would be chunky because the plaster was too old and wouldn't mix well. I've had pretty good luck with these kits. The kids enjoyed making a design with the mosaic tiles. If you choose to paint the wet plaster to create a fresco as well, know that the brush may not be reusable. Kids often get the brush deeper into the wet plaster than necessary and it may be difficult to get the plaster out. We also used some sticker mosaic kits. We got out the Model Magic again and painted the clay before it dried. The kids liked this better than painting the plaster, although with both we were able to see how the paint would soak into the material.
Science:
Our science journey into ancient Rome began with a study of volcanoes. We discussed the different shapes in which volcanoes can be found. We basically looked at shield and cones. The shield is a more rounded shape, with a slow lava flow. Cinder cones and composite tend to be taller, and cone shaped. They usually have a larger explosion. People often think about lava flow with volcanoes, but often there is an ash problem as well. We talked about Pompeii, and how archaeologists found the remains of Romans in everyday life, as they had no idea that Vesuvius was a volcano. They didn't even know what volcanoes were as they hadn't witnessed any. Volcanoes were named for Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge and fire. I actually have a sample of ash from the Mount St. Helens explosion, given to me by a friend. We looked at our sample. We built our own volcano with friends, using a bottle to hold the magma. We placed the bottle in the center of a cake pan. Clay is excellent for building up the shape of the volcano. Once our volcano took shape, we added some red liquid watercolor to the bottle. We added baking soda and vinegar to the bottle, and watched it erupt. Kids love the baking soda volcanoes, so we had repeat eruptions until we ran out of supplies.
We explored Roman aqueducts and designed our own using marble tracks. It was fun to see how tall we could build our track before it fell over. We used marbles at first, but we took our tracks outside to test with water.
The Romans spent a lot of time studying the weather, as many ancient societies did. We looked at the clouds, noticing wispy Cirrus, fluffy Cumulus and thick Stratus. We used shaving cream mixed with some glue and some cotton balls to make pictures of the sky. We used a thermometer to check the temperature, although I don't think our thermometer was working quite right. The temperature wouldn't read over 60 degrees, but it would read lower temperatures when we put it in the freezer.
We ended our journey through Roman science with one of my daughter's favorite topics - space. This time, we noted the planets names and the names of the Roman gods. We created some scale models to demonstrate the positions and size of the planets in the solar system. First we gathered fruit to represent size, then turned it into a solar system fruit salad. We used the activity by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, but with a few variations based of what we could find. First, instead of a peppercorn we used dried blueberries as they would taste better in the salad. Second, instead of a small orange, an apple and grapefruit, we adjusted to a lemon, an apple and a large orange the size of a grapefruit. For a scale distance, it is easiest if you use a meter stick. We drew chalk planets on the sidewalk as we measured. We also did some planet yoga. My kids love the Yoga for Kids: Outer Space Blastoff. It's a great way to exercise and also learn some science. From volcano pose for Mars to balancing sideways for Uranus and rolling on your back for Scooter on Neptune, each pose ties into an interesting fact for the planet.
Miscellany:
We repeated our library science activity, researching the time and place of the Roman Empire. We read a few stories of St. Valentine, to learn about Christianity in Rome. My daughter really loved the story with the daughter of the jailer cured by St. Valentine. We also explored the Roman Baths, looking at pictures from when my mom and I traveled in Bath, England. We talked about how bath houses were a fun place to hang out with friends, but the water is dangerous there today because of the lead. We connected the floor heating system used by the Romans to our time in Yellowstone exploring hot springs.
Spelling List and Sentence of the Week for K/1st grader:
Language Arts lessons include some simple questions about the spelling list, like finding the nouns, making rhymes or counting syllables. We read and write our sentence of the week every weekday.
Love, Heart, Red, Pink, White, Pretty, Rome, Volcano, Jupiter, Mars
Venus is pretty.
Cupid shoots arrows.
Bees can sting.
Argus has one hundred eyes.
Myths:
Every week we read a myth and did an activity based around the myth. We began with two stories of the founding of Rome. We read from Geraldine McCaughrean's Roman Myths. The first few stories tie together into a simplified version of the Aeneid. We began in Olympus, with Jupiter hiring Ganymede to be the cup bearer to the gods and promising to make Troy famous for a little while. The second story brought us to the love triangle of Venus, Vulcan and Mars. The jealousy wrought here led Venus to fall in love with the mortal Anchises and their child Aeneas. The next story brought about the fall of Troy. As Troy fell, Aeneas woke up to witness the fires and chaos. He managed to save his son and father, but his wife died in the city. They took his boat and set sail, a dream telling him to head to Italy. Although Juno tried to sink the boat, Neptune saved them and the boat came ashore in Carthage. Aeneas became distracted in Carthage with the beauty of Dido, but the gods reminded him of his important mission and he left. With a slight detour to the hells, he landed in Italy.
Time went by, and eventually twins were born of an ancestor of Aeneas, a Vestal virgin and the god Mars. The two boys were abandoned and raised by wolves for a time before some shepherds found them. The two boys grew and began to build a city, but constantly fought. Their fighting eventually led to the death of Remus. After this epic tale, we thought about what types of things we would want in our city and used Legos to design an city of our own, including parks, zoos, and dinosaur robots.
Our next myth led us to the story of Pygmalion. We read a summary, but also enjoyed Aphrodite the Diva from the Goddess Girls series. The Pygmalion interpretation was fun, but we also got to take a trip with the Greek goddesses into Egypt to meet some of the Egyptian goddesses. We used Model Magic to create our own mini sculptures of people. We like Model Magic because its less sticky then some other clay and dries easily. Plus its fun to color and create marbled designs. Our people didn't last long, as we enjoyed making other things out of our clay after that.
The kids of our church chose to help and study a local bee farm, which tied in great with a myth about bees and Jupiter. So after the church lesson on bees, we read the story about bees asking Jupiter for a stinger. The bee had grown tired of all the people and animals stealing his honey. He took some honey to Jupiter to ask for help. After taking a taste, Jupiter and Juno agreed to help but at a price. Bees would be given a stinger, but at the cost of its life. We planted some wildflower seeds in the hope that we too would be seeing some bees.
For our final myth, we read the story of Argus of the one hundred eyes. One of the many times Juno was jealous of Jupiter, she sent Argus to watch over Jupiter's most recent girlfriend. With his hundred eyes, she thought no one would ever sneak by but Mercury played sweet music until every eye fell asleep. Once asleep, Mercury killed him with a stone. In tribute to him, Juno transferred his eyes to the beautiful peacock. We looked at peacock feathers, and the Turkish art inspired by them. The beautiful blue colors and layers of circles. We created our own circle art.
Math:
At least once a week, our math activities would tie in with a different theme from ancient Rome. Our first activity was by far my daughter's favorite. We read Fun with Roman Numerals by David Adler. We practiced identifying some Roman numerals and then made some addition and subtraction problems with them. She loved it and wanted more all month. It was great fun.
After Roman numerals, we read a book about time and the the different types of clocks. I suggested we try to make a sundial, drawing our shadow standing at the same point at different times in the day. It's a great way to study light and shadow while studying time, but they weren't interested. They saw a water clock in the book and had to make that instead. So we used some old plastic bottles to create our own water clock, timing how long it took for the water to drain from one bottle into another, then repeating. It gave us the chance to talk about seconds and minutes as we watched the timer.
We continued are discussion of time by looking at the calendar. We talked about the creation of months, and how they are about the same length as a lunar cycle. We discussed how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the sun, and how that could be divided. Julius Caesar proposed a new calendar for Rome called the Julian calendar which moved away from the old Roman calendar which was more rooted in lunar design and would add a random month to try to keep the seasons aligned properly. After having spent time in Egypt, he spoke with others who agreed that a year should be 365.25 days based on the sun. The Julian calendar slowly spread throughout the empire, and although it would eventually be replaced by the Gregorian calendar in much of the world, it is still used in a few places. It was also fun to look at the names of the months in the old calendar and try to guess which month they are in today's calendar. Martius becomes March and Aprilis becomes April for example.
We finished our ancient Roman math lessons by making an abacus out of pipe cleaners and beads. We decided it could look any way we wanted it to, after having looked at a few examples. We talked about place value and decided we could use a separate pipe cleaner for each column. We kept is simple with a ones, a tens, and a hundreds column. The kids liked moving the beads up and down, but thought that it was faster to count and write things down.
Art:
We began our exploration of Roman art by first looking at what the average Roman would look like. My daughter drew a picture as we read, starting with the sandals they would typically wear. We moved up to the chiton or toga and finally read about their makeup. We discussed how rich Roman women were often more worried about their looks than their health, using lead to make their face pale despite some understanding of the dangers. My daughter thought it was funny that they would try to make their eyebrows meet in the middle, since most people today want them to be separate. She added rogue and eye color, as was standard. She really wanted to paint their lips red, but lipstick was an Egyptian cosmetic that did not gain much popularity in Rome.
After exploring dress and make up, we moved onto architecture. We looked at many standard buildings and then spent time exploring the Colosseum. We discussed how it was mostly used for gladiatorial contests, but the most amazing thing to happen in the Colosseum may have been the mock sea battles. It's amazing to think of the hard work involved in filling the building with water and getting boats inside.
We found some great examples of Roman metalwork sculpture. We took some aluminum foil to create our own art. At first, we tried to shape the aluminum foil to try to create a person, but after several struggles, we decided to try cutting out forms and making paper doll style aluminum foil people in the same poses of some of the sculptures. Then we played some sculpture freeze dance. We danced to some music, but when the music stopped, we had to freeze in the pose of the next sculpture.
Our final venture into the world or Roman art lead us to two different techniques that Romans liked to use to decorate their house. Romans liked sculptures decorating their houses, but also loved mosaics and frescos to decorate their houses. Michaels often has plaster mosaic kits that my kids love. My success in making plaster varies. Sometimes it's too wet and takes forever to dry, and other times it would be chunky because the plaster was too old and wouldn't mix well. I've had pretty good luck with these kits. The kids enjoyed making a design with the mosaic tiles. If you choose to paint the wet plaster to create a fresco as well, know that the brush may not be reusable. Kids often get the brush deeper into the wet plaster than necessary and it may be difficult to get the plaster out. We also used some sticker mosaic kits. We got out the Model Magic again and painted the clay before it dried. The kids liked this better than painting the plaster, although with both we were able to see how the paint would soak into the material.
Science:
Our science journey into ancient Rome began with a study of volcanoes. We discussed the different shapes in which volcanoes can be found. We basically looked at shield and cones. The shield is a more rounded shape, with a slow lava flow. Cinder cones and composite tend to be taller, and cone shaped. They usually have a larger explosion. People often think about lava flow with volcanoes, but often there is an ash problem as well. We talked about Pompeii, and how archaeologists found the remains of Romans in everyday life, as they had no idea that Vesuvius was a volcano. They didn't even know what volcanoes were as they hadn't witnessed any. Volcanoes were named for Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge and fire. I actually have a sample of ash from the Mount St. Helens explosion, given to me by a friend. We looked at our sample. We built our own volcano with friends, using a bottle to hold the magma. We placed the bottle in the center of a cake pan. Clay is excellent for building up the shape of the volcano. Once our volcano took shape, we added some red liquid watercolor to the bottle. We added baking soda and vinegar to the bottle, and watched it erupt. Kids love the baking soda volcanoes, so we had repeat eruptions until we ran out of supplies.
We explored Roman aqueducts and designed our own using marble tracks. It was fun to see how tall we could build our track before it fell over. We used marbles at first, but we took our tracks outside to test with water.
The Romans spent a lot of time studying the weather, as many ancient societies did. We looked at the clouds, noticing wispy Cirrus, fluffy Cumulus and thick Stratus. We used shaving cream mixed with some glue and some cotton balls to make pictures of the sky. We used a thermometer to check the temperature, although I don't think our thermometer was working quite right. The temperature wouldn't read over 60 degrees, but it would read lower temperatures when we put it in the freezer.
We ended our journey through Roman science with one of my daughter's favorite topics - space. This time, we noted the planets names and the names of the Roman gods. We created some scale models to demonstrate the positions and size of the planets in the solar system. First we gathered fruit to represent size, then turned it into a solar system fruit salad. We used the activity by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, but with a few variations based of what we could find. First, instead of a peppercorn we used dried blueberries as they would taste better in the salad. Second, instead of a small orange, an apple and grapefruit, we adjusted to a lemon, an apple and a large orange the size of a grapefruit. For a scale distance, it is easiest if you use a meter stick. We drew chalk planets on the sidewalk as we measured. We also did some planet yoga. My kids love the Yoga for Kids: Outer Space Blastoff. It's a great way to exercise and also learn some science. From volcano pose for Mars to balancing sideways for Uranus and rolling on your back for Scooter on Neptune, each pose ties into an interesting fact for the planet.
Miscellany:
We repeated our library science activity, researching the time and place of the Roman Empire. We read a few stories of St. Valentine, to learn about Christianity in Rome. My daughter really loved the story with the daughter of the jailer cured by St. Valentine. We also explored the Roman Baths, looking at pictures from when my mom and I traveled in Bath, England. We talked about how bath houses were a fun place to hang out with friends, but the water is dangerous there today because of the lead. We connected the floor heating system used by the Romans to our time in Yellowstone exploring hot springs.
so cool
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