January 25, 2011

  • Story of the World  - Chapter Three
    CARTOUCHE!  ((G’zhunheit.))

    We took a little longer getting to Chapter Three, because we split Chapter Two into two parts – the part about the two kingdoms becoming one ((which we illustrated within an Egyptian Lapbook… did I do that?  I’ll go back and check – cuz I should have)), and the second part was the myth of Osiris, Isis, and Horus… the Egyptian Three-part Godhead.  ((Gee, what does THAT remind me of?))  So we’re moving a bit slower than we probably should, but doing a LOT of project stuff to go with it.

    Last week’s Chapter Three in Story of the World was entitled ‘The First Writing’.  In this chapter, we read about the Egyptian’s hieroglyphics and the Sumerian writing known as cuneiform.  Fun stuff, that!  And to make the lesson come alive for us, we made cartouches for ourselves and for our penpals.

    What is a cartouche?  It’s an oblong, sort of rectangle with rounded edges that houses the name of the person in hieroglyphics on it.  Kind of like a dog tag, only they would be found on items belonging to a specific person.  You know, an ancient ‘this is the property of _____’ sort of thing.

    I looked on-line for ideas on what to do, and most of them (okay, ALL of them) sucked.  Carve your hieroglyphics into a sugar cookie.  Sure, THAT’LL last six minutes, tops.  Carve a cartouche in clay.  Carve a cartouche in a styrofoam meat tray.  I wanted something that wasn’t going to be breakable, something that wasn’t going to be difficult.  Something quick, simple, and to the point.  Something fun.  So we ordered out pizza!

    Pizza!?  What the heck!  Well, I needed the pizza box lid, you see.  ((<< and hey, any excuse not to cook.))  I used the bottom of a Tums bottle and traced the shape of a ‘dog tag’.  Many times over… since there are seven people in our family and five penpals, at last count.

    We cut out the cartouches from the pizza lid, because they were pretty durn sturdy, but not the thick double-ply (two sheets with a wavy one in between) that normal boxes are.  But thicker than, say a macaroni-n-cheese box, if y’know what I mean.

    Originally, I thought to use gold paint on them as a base.  Gold paint streaked.  So I had a gold paint pen.  Gold paint pen wasn’t gonna cover TWELVE (ish) of these things.  And honestly, I didn’t like the way Brian’s turned out… it looked dull and kind of… eh… I’m a perfectionist.  What can I say.  That’s when I got the idea for aluminum foil!

    So!  We carefully laid the pizza box cartouche face down on the not-shiny side of the foil, folded it over, and taped up the back to hold it together.  ((I wanted duct tape – silver, you know – but we couldn’t find it until later… in the car, weirdly.))  Anyhow, the foil looked really schnazzy – all sparkly and shiny!

    I found a decoder key for hierogyphics on line, printed it out, and the kids worked out what their names would look like in picture-writing on paper first.  And not just THEIR names, but their penpals names, too.  We explained to them that, unlike our left-to-right writing, the Egyptians wrote top to bottom.  So that’s the way the letters would be positioned.  Brian finished his early (playing with the gold), and so they got an idea of what it was supposed to look like.

      Then we tried ball point ink, permanent marker, but found that black gel-pens from Lydia’s pen case worked the best.  Carved in just enough and left ink in the groove that looked really nice.  With a black border around it, it added a little something, too.

    Not sure why the picture of our finished cartouches got smudgy… probably my fingers, sorry!  But everyone got to try making some, and I think they turned out pretty durn good!  And last night, when we watched a National Geographic about the Pyramids that I got from the library, they got to see a LOT of hieroglyphs on the walls, and MANY of them looked familiar. 

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