This is what we are going through this year in History.  I’ve chosen to hit the middle ground between the kids so that I can do one set of readings with them.  It’s about a year ahead of the young lad and a year lower for the young miss.  But, like all things home ed, it can be tailored to suit as you go along.

As I mentioned before, we are trialling Build Your Library this year and so far it seems to be working a treat.  We cover literature, history, art, language arts, mythology and we will be adding in the science component shortly.  Maths we already do through our My Pals Are Here! curriculum from Singapore.

What I’m enjoying about BYL is that many of those different curriculum areas are nicely tied together.  The art activities tie in with the period or culture being read about in the history section and this also applies to the mythology.  With the language arts and literature, they tie together with the book being read.

I obviously need to supplement this with ‘specific to the kid’ extras.  For instance, Miss Oh gets a bit of spelling practice while Master Oh gets some more reading practice.  But I can say categorically that we have more flow to our days now and I think some of that can be put down to using BYL.

So today, I thought I’d show you a bit of their art which tied in with their history lessons around archaeology.  Specifically, cave painting.  Here are how Miss Oh Waily and Master Oh Waily represented cave art à la Lascaux.  It helped that we already had crumpled paper from our moving that could replicate the texture of a cave wall.

Miss Oh’s art depicts a bull being hunted with a spear, and you can note her normal motif of small baby and mother included to the right of the action.  And yes, the ‘boy bits’ were intentional.

In Master Oh’s work we see a bit of a mixed theme.  And true to his style, this piece of visual art was accompanied by a lengthy explanation of what is going on.  For brevity I will shorten it here.
You are witnessing a bull being hunted.  The two figures at top and on the right are holding torches, while the figure on the left has a spear ready.  The golden spear-like object in the bull’s bottom (or “butt-arks” as Master Oh likes to call it) is supposedly a copper spear.  So a discussion regarding when technological advances was had regarding that particular aspect of the drawing.  There was more to the story, but I think that gives you the gist of it.

If you or your kids are interested in the amazing cave art of Lascaux, I can’t recommend this link more.  The interactive experience of gliding through the caves looking at the drawings is most excellent.

Happy Home Edding!