G6 Roman Clothing and G3 Birchbark House

G6 Roman Clothing: The Tunic, Layer One or By Itself + SPQR

G3 The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich

Just a quick hello and update. We are still knee-deep into our Ancient Rome block for DS11. When we worked on Ancient Greek MLB pages, I always played Ancient Greek music in the background. We tried that with four separate examples of Ancient Roman music we could find, and concluded that the music was too somber, off-key, discordant and uninteresting for our tastes. This sparked a long conversation about what art can say about a culture.

It has been said that Ancient Rome criticized the Greek people for being "too frivolous" and "not serious enough". It seems as though Roman music is almost a direct contrast to Greek music, almost purposely avoiding light-hearted, whimsical and uplifting music in favor of a more somber tone. We talked about how that contrasted with the insistence upon changing all of the Greek gods into Roman ones, with similar attributes (and even often with similar story lines). To this day, it seems that more people prefer to think of Zeus as the "King of The Gods" rather than Jupiter, but we do still have many references to the Roman gods in our calendar, planet names, and in many other words we use often. 

We had a fun talk about why some of these contradictions might have existed, and how ultimately the somber tones could not be sustained as humanity moved along in time. When we get to the beginning of the Medieval period (shortly after the holidays, likely), it will be clear that people needed a respite from their daily lives with a bit more frivolity in their music, and so the Roman tones would not be sustained except in religious institutions.

  

For the beginnings of our Native American unit (as discussed in previous posts) we've begun listening to the audiobook for The Birchbark House, by Louise Erdrich. The book is at just the right emotional level for my DD9 girl, but possibly a bit simple (and therefore likely less interesting) for my DD11 fellow (but he has been polite enough to listen along anyway).

It is a nice, slow pace with simpler concepts to introduce DD9 to the way these people lived. Today, as seen above, she drew her version of a birchbark house as depicted in the book (we found the drawing available free online). We talked about how the willow (or other tree) branches were bent into the frame and tied together, then the bark was cut off of the outside of the birch tree (the tree was thanked for giving up its bark for their home and the other tree thanked for providing the branches for the frame). The bark was then sewn into strips and then stacked one atop the other like roof tiles to ward off rain.  

FIELD TRIP: We were also fortunate enough to have a day at a nearby museum yesterday, where they (coincidentally) talked about the Abenaki Indians of Maine/NH/MA (and even spreading beyond those territories at times). The children got to touch animal pelts and skins, check out animal bones made into every day objects, and learn quite a bit about the Abenaki.