It's All Egypt

I might have mentioned a time or two how obsessed my 7-year-old son is with Egypt.

A few weeks ago his clay teacher completely adjusted the schedule to include an Egyptian theme for the week. I think she did it more to not have to hear Jack ask when they were going to do something related to Egypt. HA!

She had the coolest set of Egyptian heiroglyphic stamps that she purchased many years ago from the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art in New York during her own son's Egyptian phase.

I don't know why it never dawned on me to check out their online gift shop before. It is an art lover's paradise. Not only did I get a set of similar stamps for Jack for Easter, but I also came across some educational resource materials.

We started our Egyptian study this morning, and if all continues to go well, I'm considering purchasing their other collections down the road.

We kept it simple today. We talked about the land and people of early Egypt. Then we worked on our own project using Play-Doh.

Taking the map located in our resource guide, we created our version of ancient Egypt, complete with the Nile River, palaces, pyramids, the eye of Horus and an Egyptian army (the brown dots represent people).

The clumps on the left side were my three-year-old daughter's contribution!

Trucks

Did you know trucks were considered fine art?

A collage of truck paintings

It appears the artist John Himmelfarb has always known this.

Today we visited his exhibit at our local art museum. We've been to a lot of museums all over and have seen some great exhibits, and this one ranks with the best of them.

Himmelfarb's works are exhibited in large museums in cities like Chicago, London and New York, which makes our small-town museum pale in comparison. He works in so many mediums: watercolor, acrylic, clay, bronze, wood and the list goes on and on.

The artist, a native of the midwest, completed this painting during several Saturday sessions at the museum. The finishing signature date is less than a month old. Watching him work would have been remarkable to see, and I hate we missed out on it.

And we took in a few of the other works of art in the other gallery while there.

The Whale

The Goddess

Notice anything particularly different about this last piece? It's a sculpture made completely out of shoes!!!

Space Explorations

We've been studying a lot about outer space during our science Friday lessons, so much so that science Friday isn't occurring only on Fridays.

I found some lectures on Open Yale that I used to supplement our first few lessons. From those we were able to discuss exoplanets and the geocentric model in-depth.

These last few weeks we've been working from a book studying the sun, Mercury and Venus.

We've even thrown in a few experiments. The purpose of this one was to use the butter as the representation of the rock (a solid), melt it on the stove (to form the liquid) and then pour it over a cup onto flour to represent the lava running onto the surface of Venus.

After letting it sit a while, we came back to feel the surface once the "lava" had cooled.

And because Jack is so into planets at the moment, I'm trying to plan some cool daily or weekend trips in March or April. There's a planetarium nearby. I've heard great things about the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, GA and want to include that on our list. There's also a Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL that would be great to visit at some point along the way.