Stone Age

I have been wanting to study history with the children for a while now what with visiting all these wonderful museums, castles and houses. I just didn't know where to begin. I know quite a few people who have started with the Victorians but I wanted to structure it more clearly in my head, and with Julian's phase of Dinosaur loving I thought that we would start at the beginning. Sooooo we are starting with the stone age. Also the Waldorf guidelines say to study housebuilding with grade 3 which fits in perfectly.

To say that we are starting with the stone Age isn't exactly true because by looking back to the stone age it has made the children question about the earth and the universe and its formation and about evolution. So although we have been concentrating on the stone Age, in between we have been doing a lot of investigation into the beginning of the world, how the oceans came to be, what is in the universe, how did life come to be on the planet, how did we evolve, what exactly happened to the dinosaurs, our solar system etc.

We have a wonderful book called Living History which provides lots of activities relating to certain time periods. The children are LOVING it!

Instead of working in their mainlesson books we have decided to put their work into a lapbook.

Champ really loved the idea of the stone age tools. We couldn't wait to find flint so we decided to raid our own stone collection and just give it a go. It was a great lesson on different types of stones and their properties.

Boo wasn't as interested in the stones as Champ was but she did give it a go. I love the way she has curled her toes up.

We found out that to make a genuine stone age tool we needed to have flint. But not just any flint as stones that were on the surface, that had been touched by frost were no good. Instead we need to find flint from under the ground. We then need to warm the flint (it shouldn't turn black) and then just a light bang on the stone will yield results. We haven't tried flint yet but we are on the look out :o)

Of course the younger two were not going to be left out of this.

Kiki still gets the stones out of the cupboard to bang them together.

Another activity we did was to make clay caves.

Googs decided to roll some firewood out of clay.

We covered a wooden board with plaster of paris. Once it was dry the kids took turns to paint it.

They then added some chippings from the stones and some clay scrapings from making pots and added it as gravel.

After that they made the fire, fish, swan, spears, figures and baskets out of beeswax. Then they put it all together and added some greenery.

These prehistoric animal pictures are now living on the younger two's bedroom walls.

Cave paintings! Not sure why I don't have a picture of Boo doing a painting - thinking it might have been because I was covered in red paint!