Feasting and Speaking Like the Ancients
Being what I like to call a “total body learner,” Athena loves to really emerse herself in studying a subject. This often means she desires to engage all of her senses in the process. She is truly what Sarah Ban Breathnach would call a “sensuist.” So when we start discussing and reading about Ancient Egypt, she not only wants to walk like an Egyptian, but eat, dress, write and speak like one too. We have enjoyed an Ancient Mesopotamian and Ancient Hebrew Feast Night so far and our Ancient Egyptian Feast Night is in the works for the next week or so. I am planning on, at some point, creating a page here for Feasting Like the Ancients with all the menus from our feast nights for others to enjoy. Artemis and Apollo’s favorite feature of feast night is the total lack of silverware and the sitting on the floor to eat in the name of historical accuracy. They are sensuist learners in the making, I just know it. Luckily, in order to satisfy these total emersion learning binges, we have a pretty impressive public library system loaded with great resources and homeschool friendly librarians I can pillage and plunder at will. I managed to track down short audio courses in Egyptian Arabic, Eastern Arabic and Hebrew. No luck with Sumerian though. Even our library system has its limits, I guess. This morning, on the way to a “Not-Back-To-School” party, she learned how to say she knows a little Arabic and that she is an American in Eastern Arabic. I envy the ease with which young children can pick up foreign language pronounciation. I also must say that I hated with a passion the traditional institutional methods of teaching foreign languages and never did very well in those classes, usually as a direct result of my refusal to copy my vocabulary words five times each and other drudgery like that. I always felt like I probably could pick up languages fairly easily if they weren’t presented in such a tedious manner. So I guess here is a prime opportunity for me to test that theory. We have a long road trip coming up and Athena already asked me to be sure to pack up the language CDs for the drive. I also discovered that they do indeed still make aqua colored eye shadow. I very rarely ever wear make-up anymore and even when I do it is usually just a little foundation, a touch of mascara and a bit of lip gloss, so I was woefully unprepared to provide Athena with a semi-authentic Egyptian look. A quick trip to the grocery store unearthed the required black eyeliner and aqua eye shadow and presto-chango, there stood Nefertiti/Hatshepsut (she changes her mind about which Queen she’s more fond of at the moment) in my living room. I think we will be wallowing in Ancient Egypt for the rest of the month unless Athena tires of it before that. I was not planning on experiencing the classical ed homeschooling rite of passage that is King Cluck, the chicken mummy, this go around, but she asked me yesterday what we could mummify and since the cat and her twin siblings are sort of out of the question, I guess I will not be escaping that project after all. It will, however, have to wait until after my sister’s wedding next week.
