International Festival 2011

Our support group hosts an international festival each year.  Participating families select a country to study and create a project board about that country.  We also prepare traditional food to share with each other.

Costumes are optional, but our family loves to get dressed up.

This year Orville (not pictured) dressed as a tomb raider.  He wore all black and a Zorro mask.  Wilbur (left) bought the King Tut headdress with money he earned from helping me make soap (his choice) from Party City.  I cut a yellow twin flat sheet to make his robe.  I also cut the blue sash from a flat sheet and added beads with fabric glue.

I made my Cleopatra headdress from felt and attached strands of beads with packing tape (on the inside so it's not visible).  My dress and robe are my living room curtains. 

Yes, you read that right.

I went all Sound-of-Music and draped my drapes around me and then pinned them in place with safety pins.  And yes, I had seriously heavy amounts of make-up on.

This is our display board.

For our display, Wilbur drew the pictures of the ten plagues on the left side of the board as well as the pictures of Joseph, Moses, the pyramid, the sphinx and the sarcophagus in the middle.  He also sketched the map of Egypt on the right side of the board.  Orville wrote the text and colored the pictures of the Egyptian gods.

We included Psalm 135 in the top middle, an appropriate Psalm about God's sovereignty, power and covenant keeping and explaining how the false gods of the world are nothing.

Wilbur and I constructed this pyramid from foam board.

He measured three triangles of equal dimensions.  I cut them out (I'm to blame for the zig-zaggy sections!) and then we taped them together with packaging tape.  I mixed sand with brown tempera paint, and he applied two coats.  Once dry, he painted the gold cap with yellow tempera mixed with gold glitter.

Meanwhile, Orville researched the pharaohs of the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms of Egypt and typed a short report for 5-6 Pharaohs from each period.  He printed his reports along with pictures from wikipedia and glued them to the pyramid once it was dry.  Each side was designated for one of the three periods.

In the above picture,
you can see the food we brought
(or at least the bowls).
That is Sweet Egyptian Couscous on the platter.
One bowl contained Chick Pea Salad and the other melon.

The boys decided to make paper clothes for two of their plush toys.
This Audubon owl is "Hoot"ankhamun.

Get it?

Tutankhamen, Hoot-ankhamun.

What a hoot!

This Webkinz cat was named in honor of
the only female pharaoh, Hatshepsut.

It was a great festival, and we had a lot of fun!  We learned a lot in the process, too.

However, I am still recovering from the flurry of activity, mounds of paper scraps in the classroom and office, watermelon splatter on the kitchen floor from where I dropped a quarter of one melon and it slammed fruit side onto the floor, little trails of sand all around the dining room floor, powdered sugar fingerprints all over the kitchen cabinets and beads rolling around me everywhere I step.

Oh, and I still need to go wash and hang my curtains!

Happy Homeschooling! 

Dawn