Cultural comparisons

I was impressed this morning. As Reo and I were running errands, we discussed what we were going to have for lunch, we discussed what Ancient Egyptians ate, what benefits those meals provided, their labor-intensive lifestyle, the differences in how we live now, and why the plates are so small for gourmet "meals".

You can't build a pyramid with this in your stomach but you'll be able
to say things like "explosive flavor" and "visually intriguing".

You may naturally assume that this discussion was mostly me rambling on in my likely know-it-all manner to impart knowledge upon my child, however, I did most of the listening. Reo had done this research on his own, completely independent from me. While I did contribute to the discussion, he had thoroughly examined these differences between Ancient Egypt and now, including the technological differences, environment influences, political climates, foreign affairs, and survival mandates. There was a tremendous amount of factual information in what he said. I have fact-checked him and he's entirely correct. What I was most impressed by was his initiative to compare the food and lifestyle in 2000 BCE Egypt to 2000 CE United States, particularly with the elite treatment of food and his concluding opinions about this broad-scope comparison as it relates to our food as a culture, based solely on his curiosity.

I've asked him to write a document as he feels is most appropriate to convey this information in an interesting and creative way. This is due Friday. This is solely for the portfolio and to help him stay sharp in producing written materials for class assignments.

Since I have taken a part-time job, it is important that he remain confident in his ability to perform well in a traditional education format in case public school comes back into his life for the next school year. Plus, it's not only important to have these materials for his portfolio, but also to help silence a discussion with my mother where she once again reminds me that she has no confidence in my ability to teach my children. Yes, I have one of those parents. Thankfully, Reo doesn't.

Walk like an Egyptian...

...which turns out to be not too dissimiliar to how we walk now so, I guess, just walk like you normally do.

As I'm prone to do, I download an enormous amount of ebooks through Amazon Kindle and then let Reo decide what direction he'd like to go.

Per-Bast: A Tale of Cats in Ancient Egypt by Lara-Dawn Stiegler. Buy it here.

Reo chose to begin reading, "Per-Bast: A Tale of Cats in Ancient Egypt" by Lara-Dawn Stiegler. It's a mythological/historical hybrid fiction that places cats front and center in ancient Egypt. It's a marvelous, creative novel that captivates and compels. I was impressed by his choice. Reo had officially decided the first quarter material of his fourth grade year.

Ancient Egypt

These things are actually the least interesting parts of ancient Egypt.

Beyond the egos of the pharaohs, we have a rich and prosperous civilization. Language, art, math, economy, cities, farmland, markets, schools, music, dance, marriage, celebration, funerals, families, traditions, religion, architecture, food!

First stop: Scribe School

Reo will get nowhere if he can't read and write the language, so it's a crash course at scribe school for both of us to get the gist of some hieroglyph basics. How do you have a crash course for a written language so intricate and articulate that it surpasses in beauty and originality any other language on earth? Clumsily, of course! But my job is to drive his curiosity wherever it wants to go. If he wants more than this crash course, he'll get more. Our school isn't about "getting by" or "just getting through it". It's about learning, understanding, and having permission to seek more.

Math is always fun!

You can probably understand why few people went to scribe school.

Reo already has a handle on addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions. So, we implemented all those mathematic methods with hieroglyphs. Does it work? Is this a more or less efficient way to calculate sums and communicate numbers?

We will continue using hieroglyphs in our following lessons as we explore more ancient Egypt. I'm especially interested to introduce him to geometry and how the ancient Egyptians used it for architecture.