History crafts today

Story of the World, chapter 12, is about the Middle Kingdom of Egypt. We read it ages ago, and did the map and coloring pages for it. Then history stalled for weeks. We re-read the chapter about 10 days ago, but stalled again. We've managed to read some of the suggested books, but that's about it. Today we opened the activity book and did some of the crafts.

Sayer and Duncan made Egyptian arm cuffs out of toilet paper tubes. We decorated them with gold paint and sticky jewels. :)

Then we were supposed to make a monkey sock doll to represent the animals that the conquered Nubians brought to the Egyptians. It was a sock filled with dried beans and glued-on felt arms, legs, tail and ears. I decided that since I'd had a similar enough craft in mind as a gift, we'd do that instead. So we got out some felted wool sweater scraps and sewed the basic animal shape, turned it inside out, and stuffed it with more wool scraps. After it was stuffed and sewn shut we decided it was an owl. Okay, so the Nubians probably didn't bring owls to the Egyptians, but this was definitely not a monkey. It is an owl ... or a cat head. After the owl was done we made another and stitched on button eyes and nose and decorated it with yarn to make a cat face. Woo hoo - history craft and holiday gift making all rolled into one! :)