Story of the World Vol. 3 Chapter 1

So, we've almost finished our first whole month of the school year. The kids are very glad to be back in a routine, surprisingly! And they especially are glad to be back to their beloved history lessons. They really do love using this curriculum. 

We're scheduled to have our first History Club review session tomorrow, but since most of the kids in the class have colds, we're trying to reschedule.  So for now I'll just post a fun activity we did as a family while studying the first chapter together.

We learned about the Spanish raid of precious metals in the Americas.  They exploited the natives to work in their mines. We explored the concept of mines and mine shafts and tried our hand at building a flour mine shaft. 

We dug tunnels to the bottom of a bucket of flour trying to discover the 3 plastic coins I had buried there.  It was tough to keep the flour from collapsing on itself.

So we built some shafts using craft sticks, paper and tape. We had several prototypes.  You'll see one of them pictured below.  Mostly we just had fun digging in the flour!

The not so fun part?  Finding plastic coins in my pizza dough mix a few days later!!