Friday, October 07, 2011

Recreating the Nile and Building a Pyramid

Last Friday my friend and I had the kids mix up a bunch of sand with a whole lot of glue to start the process of making sand cubes for a pyramid. We followed the ingredient list in the SOTW Activity Guide, which reads: "sand," "glue" but gives no measurements for either. So we just guessed. I'm not sure how much sand we used, it was a fifty-pound bag, I'm thinking it was about a quarter of it. But we did use at least three bottles of glue and some mod-podge just for extra sturdiness.

It worked! You've seen the pictures in other posts. But today we got to pull the cubes off of my baking sheet and build.

Building.


The end result. I am a terrible photographer. Sorry about that.

 Like I said, the pyramid would have looked a lot better if the blocks really were the same shape and size. But we had a good time building anyway. Maybe next time we won't do this during ant season and we'll be able to use the sugar cubes.

And now for the Nile...

This was a pretty straight-forward project, which was nice. It also didn't really take too long. The hardest part was getting the Nile Delta right.

Please ignore the colors and lines. I have no idea what's happening.
 Shaping the foil and laying down the river bed.

 Look, Sam is participating! Putting down the dirt for the banks of the Nile.


After the inundation. Hopefully the papyrus (grass) will germinate with in the next week or so. We'll have to get our Playmo Egyptians to mow their lawn.

And that's it for Egypt. This is more projects than I think I've ever done before and it's really because another mom and I realized that we were in the same spot in SOTW and that we also had free time on the same afternoon. That never happens so it must be fate that brought us together.

Next Up...A Ziggurat.


1 comment:

MissMOE said...

Your sand cubes are a great idea. I have a bag of sand in my backyard that I've been wondering what the heck to do with it! Now I have a plan. Thanks for sharing.