We have enrolled Emanuel in the Little Passports series and one of our monthly mailings was EGYPT. We couldn’t just look at what came in the mail so it morphed into time to make a poster about this rather intriguing country! I hope our resources and findings are helpful!

BOOKS:

• Ten Little Mummies by Philip Yates HERE
• Skippyjon Jones in Mummy Trouble by Judy Schachner HERE
• A Look at Egypt by Helen Frost HERE
• How the Sphinx Got to the Museum by Jessie Hartland HERE
• Egypt ABCs by Sarah Heiman HERE
• You Wouldn’t Want to be Tutankhamen! by David Stewart HERE
• Ancient Egypt by Cynthia Klingel and Robert B. Noyed HERE
• Eyewitness Pyramid by James Putnam HERE
• Everything Ancient Egypt by Crispin Boyer HERE
• Eyewitness Ancient Egypt by George Hart HERE
• Ancient Egypt Beyond the Pyramids by Kathleen W. Deady HERE
• Egypt in Pictures by Jeffrey Zuehlke HERE
• Miriam and Her Brother Moses by Jean Marzollo HERE
• Ms. Frizzle’s Adventures Ancient Egypt by Joanna Cole HERE
• Who Built the Pyramid? by Meredith Hooper HERE
• Mummies in the Morning – a Magic TreeHouse mystery by Mary Pope Osborne HERE

HELPFUL WEBSITES:

• Virtual Reality 3D Tomb Tours HERE though we could not get it to run on our laptop. If someone could figure it out I would love a head up on how they did it!!!
• A series of the Eye of Ra images. I needed them for my part on one of mini books HERE thanks to Waktattoos.com
• Ducksters’ Egypt Map HERE, Odyssey’s map HERE

PRINTABLES

• A mini book with the current Egyptian flag from Activity Village HERE.
• Ancient Egypt wordsearch HERE (Activity Village)
• Ancient Egypt map colouring page HERE (Activity Village)
• Current flag colouring page HERE (Activity Village)
• Sphinx colouring page HERE (Activity Village)
• Pyramids colouring page HERE (Activity Village)
• Ancient Egyptian children colouring page HERE (Activity Village)
• Egypt colouring page on Education.com HERE
• List of Ancient Egypt worksheets on Education.com HERE

CRAFTS

• Egyptian Pyramid model papercraft with Education.com HERE
• Make a Mummy papercraft HERE (Education.com)

ANSWERING QUESTIONS

• Ancient Egyptian beards… why? With Musiem HERE
• All about Egyptian gold… Live Science’s article on clues to the origins of it HERE. A comparison between Egyptian and Roman gold HERE. The Gold of the Pharaohs by Softpedia HERE.
• All about the Sphinx… why is it a half person half lion? Mentormob’s article HERE.
• Toothbrushing in Ancient Egypt! Including the use of cosmetics on The Alchemy Web Site HERE. Wiki Answers’ take HERE.
• What do Egyptians do for fun? Ask.com’s answer HERE. ThinkQuest’s answer HERE

VIDEOS
First off, CrashCourse’s Ancient Egypt: Crash Course World History #4

The History of Ancient Egypt in 2 Minutes! Vsion 1.0 by Scott Powell, the History Guy

Ancient Egypt – The Mystery of the Sphinx by Plancheman100

Mystery of the Sphinx (this is part 1 you can find the rest by the same poster) by Pharaoh3000

  SUGGESTED CRAFTS (we didn’t make it to doing these as light caught up with us)

• Salt Dough Plaque (Activity Village) HERE
• Pharaoh’s Headdress (Activity Village) HERE
• Flail Craft (Activity Village) HERE
• Ankh Fuse Bead design (Activity Village) HERE

Do you have a yearning to learn more about this rare, unique and amazing mammal? Well, here are all the resources, links, etc that we used to learn about this Australian animal!!

The lapbook:

• Platypus Animal Study and Lapbook by Homeschool Share. Really the only one out there and very helpful.

Books:

• Platypuses by Sara Louise Kras
• Electric Animals by Natalie Lunis (this has a two page piece on the platypus’ ability to use electroreceptors to find food)
• Platypus by Chris Riddell (a story book not a non fiction book)
• A Platypus, Probably by Sneed B. Collard III
• Platypus, A Century-long Mystery by William Caper

Crafty Bits:

• Make your own Platypus on Learn Create Love by using their instructions HERE. We put our legs on with brads and went without the googly eyes.
• Make your own Platypus paperbag puppet using instructions by Danielle’s Place HERE. The cutting is a little advanced on the feet for true preschoolers but we managed!
• We didn’t make it to this craft but it looks fun, make your own Perry the Platypus out of felt and foam HERE.

Colouring Pages

• P is for Platypus HERE.
• Flag of Australia HERE.
• A random Platypus HERE.
• Mommy and baby with eggs HERE. Though the eggs are bigger than they should be etc etc.

Worksheets

• Compare the tracks of various Australian animals HERE.
• Learn a bit about the Platypus and colour one as well HERE.
• Wordsearch for the older kids HERE.
• All about platypus colouring page and fill in the blank riddle HERE.
• Duck Billed Platypus Anatomy HERE.
• Platypus mini book to fill in yourself HERE.
• Platypus notebooking pages with colour image of a swimming platypus HERE.
• Templates that we used for our end of book facts of interest HERE.
• Not so much a worksheet but a POEM!! 4-40 has a great platypus poem HERE.

We have an amazing picture of platypus babies thanks to Facebook via Dr. Carin Bondar – Biologist with a Twist. Keep in mind her Facebook profile HERE does have some more mature content this picture is certainly worth it! The tagline with this picture when it made its way to my timeline is as follows:

Here’s your daily dose of adorable – baby platypuses! There’s no official name for baby platypuses, but they’re often referred to as puggles or platypups.
Platypuses are one of the five extant species of monotreme, meaning that they are mammals that lay eggs. It’s also one of the very few venomous mammals – the male has a “spur” that’s capable of delivering enough venom to kill a small dog.

Babies

Videos:

I will for the most part embed, but some do not allow it. Hopefully these will remain valid videos for some time! Our first video is from youTube subscriber 911TRUTHINATOR and is a longer educational piece on the “World’s Strangest Animal.”

National Geographic and their dangerous hunter themed video. I will warn you, they pump up the platypus to seem scary (??) the kids did NOT approve.

A short video of the Senior Platypus Keeper Ian Elton with Ember the 6 month old platypus.

In Australia, Go Paddling With the Platypus. Seriously… we live on the wrong continent. This video gives a bit of a close look to a playful platypus.

Check out the video below to see a platypus doing platypus things at Mount Field National Park.

Of course there are all the moments of Perry the Platypus on Phineas and Ferb. We specifically borrowed The Perry Files from the library. Wild Kratts also have a platypus focused episode called Platypus Cafe that you can purchase on Amazon.com.

Helpful links:

• Wonder how the platypus got its name? Well Wiki Answers knows right HERE.
• National Geographic Kids Creature Feature platypus HERE.
• KidsBiology.com has a brief page on the platypus HERE.
• Squuidoo has a great fact page HERE.

Part of the lapbook calls for looking at the Echidna who is the other mammal in the Monotreme family. So here are our links that we used to supplement what tiny bit of information we had in our library books!

• EnchantedLearning has a page with an anatomy picture HERE.
• Activity Village has a mini book we used to record what we learned HERE. We took the little file folder shape from the lapbook and made it into a pocket to put our mini book in.
• Kids.net.au has a great Echidna page HERE.

We used two videos with our Echidna. I am warning you now, youTube seems to carry a lot of information on the male reproductive organs of the Echidna. The two videos I have below do NOT cover this aspect as I did not feel that the… uniqueness of this portion of the animal was necessary to our learning.

First a National Geographic Video – World’s Weirdest.

And our second video about an Echidna Puggle at Taronga Zoo. Unlike the platypus, the echidna has an official name for its babies – the puggle.

And that is that! Here are a few of our pages! I hope this comes in helpful. If it does, please send me a message, leave a comment… etc.

Platypus cover

A couple sample pages

And two more

January 26-28

How to end a week of saying good bye and getting used to a new normal? Well by celebrating Darcy’s birthday with homemade cupcakes and mint icing over at their house. Sadly, big Andy was not there but we made up for it with lots of fun, some good pizza and amazing friends.

Anthony with his Canadian flag. Thank you so much for mailing one down Sharon!

Skylanders in a new location

We were there from noon well on into the evening. The kids had a blast and we 3 adults got to visit and relax.

Sleepy Echo with Andrew… new hair cut and all. Poor thing, he scared her earlier in the day by accident!

There was a new dog to play with (Darcy is looking after her grandmother’s chihuahua for a while) which had Echo in absolute joy. A dog HER size! She was nearly fearless by the end of the night, playing with BOTH dogs and visiting with Snoopy the cat.

Snoopy

The wee dog

I am hopeful that now that Ken’s great job hunt is at an end I can focus on visiting more with the Novaks.

Anthony and Trinity

Supper together

Ken helped Andrew and Anthony out with setting up a new Minecraft account. I think that if Anthony does not get his own before his birthday that will be our gift to him.

The guru and his disciples

I wish I had a better picture of the birthday girl, but we had such a great time relaxing just like this all afternoon!

Darcy and the lap dog

This is definitely a bonus to being close… time with our god-son!

Anthony

Sunday was an at home day, the cousins were still here until the middle of the day and really we were not motivated to run any errands. So lots of fun kid time and yours truly snuck in a nap!

Relaxing tv time

Monday was back to work and life. But first – 5 kids in the great white outdoors. Ken took a bit of time off his lunch break and took Echo out to join in on the fun. I just love any opportunity to put that teddy bear hat on her. I got the pattern from CrochetSpot of course. Right HERE.

With Daddy

So much gorgeous snow

We started our Chinese New Year Library book marathon with Monday… We read the book together, talk about it and write down some key points and then make a little mini card style thing. Title, picture and of course the points. This is going to be one interesting poster. Our first book – The Runaway Wok. Also one that we read LAST year back in Canada. Something that the kids remembered right off and thought was TERRIFIC that they had this book in BOTH countries. What a memory they have!

Looking through the pictures a second time

Our booklet for our poster

Book #2… Bringing in the New Year. Beautiful illustrations, informative and fun. We really enjoyed this one!

We are alternating illustrators… so here is Gavin

Book #3… yup we were one a roll… Max Celebrates Chinese New Year. This one the BOYS read to us! They did a great job, each reading half of it.

And together with the leveled reader

Of course we had our kiddo tv to watch… I love how much they take away from these Junior shows.

Yo-ho-ho

We are working our way through the many worksheets and colouring pages on Activity Village and Education.com (both links to the main sites are on the right). I am hoping that we can continue our basic stuff – math, reading, etc etc as I feel like we are progressing nicely. And now that Ken is working again we can work towards some more pricey learning options in the next year! Whheeeee!

I just LOVE this hat!