We learnt all about an Ancient Roman Villa in the countryside when we read about the comings and goings of siblings Marcus and Julia in ‘Spend the Day in Ancient Rome‘ great activity book for 8-12 year olds:
Each morning, I have been reading a chapter from here and then we have been doing any activities which I think might go along with the book’s chapter. The first few chapters were about the family leaving their villa in the country and returning to their villa in Rome. We learnt about the challenges of travelling during the night time, because it was illegal to travel during the day into or out of Rome because of congestion.
Pick up any book about Ancient Rome and you’ll find a chapter about an Ancient Roman villa. So, I had the girls read these chapters in each of the following books:
Papyrus Journal
To include some writing about Ancient Rome, I made them a papyrus journal (I will write a post about how I did this). This they wrote in every day with a reed ink pen. This was a very messy and time consuming endeavour 😬. It got some writing in but, to be honest, it didn’t encourage any great literary works! Unfortunately, the focus was more on the physical creation of letters rather than the actual quality of writing. This is a wonderfully informative chapter about how the Ancient Romans wrote, on what and with what.
Build an Ancient Roman Villa
I love the Usborne building models, and we have used them a lot in our homeschool:
They are quite fiddly but the detail in them makes it well worth the effort. The girls built this Usborne Roman Villa whilst I read our old ex-library book on Roman Villas (see book photos above):
We were really pleased by the end result. And in reading the book whilst the girls were building, meant they could find the area I was reading about.
We will be using the villa as part of the display for our Ancient Roman presentation.
Really looking forward to the day when we can do this sort of thing with our 2 girls (2 & 3 yrs), especially as Mum is actually Roman 🙂
Your mum’s a Roman? That’s so cool! You have such wonderful times ahead of you. Homeschooling is such an incredible journey ❤️
Hehe, I’m the dad so it’s their mum, my wife, who’s the Roman. Though her mum was a Roman too. 3 Yr old can point to mum’s birthplace on a map and wants to know what things are called in Italian 😀
Hi dad 👋
Will your children be brought up bilingual? I would have loved to have enough of a second language to teach my guys to talk two languages. Unfortunately, I am woeful at all languages (apart from maybe English 😂). That said, one of my twins has just chosen to study German and Spanish as two of her options for a classics degree…
That’s the idea, yes, so they know some words (aspetta for wait, vieni for come, and they’ll say buongiorno and buonanotte etc) and they’ve got the concept of other languages, so they are learning the Italian words for colours and shapes etc. It’s surprisingly not as easy as it should be to get Italian primers (the sort of thing you’d imagine Italian kids would read), much is actually translated English books. I’m also terrible at languages so to my shame I still don’t really know Italian. We’re going to stay at my wife’s family place in the South for August so I’m hoping some immersion will help the girls 🙂
You always come up with the coolest hands on projects! I do pretty well with art and science but never can think of good hands on projects to go with history lessons.
Hi Joanne 👋. Thank you! I remember you doing an art project for a day for a year a few years back – you’re amazing (and really diligent!) to think up and do so many art activities ❤️