Aeneid Class: Week 4: How to Throw a Roman Dinner Party

This post relates to my literature class for children at Homeschool Out of the Box co-op in Norfolk, VA. This semester we are reading The Aeneid, using Penelope Lively's book In Search of a Homeland, and other supplemental materials. For other lessons, please click the Aeneid tag at the bottom of this post.

Overview: The lesson to be learned from this event involves the concept of civilization and what it means to be civilized. The Romans valued their civility highly, and dinner parties were an opportunity to express these qualities in public. They practiced rituals, demonstrated courtesy and respect, and strictly adhered to traditions and conventions. It was very important for the Romans to define themselves as civilized and therefore superior to the barbarian cultures around them. As we discussed in The Jungle Book, a colonizing nation must see the colonized people as "other" and also as inferior, so that the invasion can be seen as helping the dominated peoples, and the conquerors can be seen as saviors.

The interesting thing about the Roman dinner party is that compared to a dinner party today, it's not very civilized at all! As I asked the kids... if someone came to your house for dinner and they sat on the floor, ate with their hands from the serving dishes, and maybe excused themselves to vomit in between courses, would that be civilized? What if they weren't wearing any pants? Today's standards of "civilized behavior" are different from the Romans' standards -- but who's to say that in another 2000 years people will find it low and vile to eat with forks and put napkins in our laps? So, during the party, you want to underscore the importane of the Roman rituals and behaviors, and pretend to be very proud of your intensely refined and civilized behavior.

Preparations:

Step one: Prepare the food and drink. We used olives, boiled eggs, raw cabbage, chicken, pepperoni, grapes, apples, pears, figs, and dates.



We decanted white grape juice into empty bottles that we had labelled appropriately.



Step two: Set the mood with some music. If you have any musicians skilled in playing the lyre, call on them now. We downloaded a Synaulia album and played that on a CD player.

Step two: Set the table. Remember that Romans ate close to the floor. You can simulate this by using a regular folding table without folding out the legs. Drape some fabric over the whole table, including some on the floor where the guests will recline. You'll need a centerpiece that can later be offered as a sacrifice. We used a cabbage.



Step three: Invite in your guests! Encourage everyone to dress up.



The Dinner:

Toast: Give everyone a cup with some ice in it. Explain about how the Romans didn't have refrigerators or freezers, but they did acquire ice from the mountains and keep it cold in deep pits. Boast that the fact that you have ice at your dinner party reflects your intense civilization and impressive wealth. A common table wine was called Mulsum, which was water, wine, and honey. Ask your students why the Romans might have watered down their wine, especially considering that dinner parties sometimes went on for hours. Have the slaves pour out the "wine" and then toast Rome!

Appetizers: You can give each guest a napkin with which to eat, but remind them that in Roman times they would have had their own napkin which they would bring from home to any dinner party they attended, kind of like a personal hankerchief. Pass around the eggs and olives. Talk about how a really great appetizer in Roman times would have been a stuffed dormouse.

Main course: Explain that Romans didn't eat a lot of beef, because they used their cows for work. After a few years of work, a cow would be so tough and chewy that you'd have to cook it for a week before it was edible. Why go through all that drama when you could cook up a pig right away. Pigs didn't have to work, and pork was the Romans' favorite meat.





Sacrifice: Between the main course and the dessert, the Romans paused to sacrifice to their household gods. Here is our altar:



Have one guest bring the sacrificial cabbage, and another light the candles. Then observe a moment of silence during which you respect your Roman values, and the ideas that are important to your family.



Dessert: Pass around the fruit, including the dates and figs, which some of your guests might find unfamiliar.

Entertainment:

After dinner, invite your guests to entertain the group with poetry recitation, song, and dance. Celia M. and Sarah R, from our academic track class, were able to recite the soliloquy from Julius Caesar, and Martina E. set a new record for memorizing the Virgil, at 6 lines in Latin. In the enrichment track class, one of our slaves brought Max N.'s little brother Seth, who recited eight lines of Shakespeare to my amazement! He was immediately granted citizenship in the class. The enrichment track class also engaged in some dancing after dinner:



Guests can also entertain themselves by playing Knucklebones or Latrunculi.





I sent all my friends out to carouse through Rome after my party was over. I hope they all had a wonderful time! Didn't see a picture of your child? or just want to see more pictures of our awesome class? Click here for more Aeneid Class pictures.

Assignment for next week: Make sure you have read through chapter 3 in the book. By now everyone should have a copy! :) Next week we will be making mosaics. Please let your children have a look at some mosaic tile work online. Here's another page with mosaics, and another page.

Army National Guard Recruiting Homeschoolers to Path of Honor

The Army National Guard has a new program: The Homeschooler's Path to Honor. You could summarize this new program by saying this: "We, the Army National Guard, will cheerfully accept your homeschool diploma in lieu of a high school diploma from a traditional school."

That makes sense. After all it's only right and normal that they accept a homeschool diploma. State universities do. Why not the Army? So, fine. However, instead of a notice of that bit of clerical updating, on the "Path to Honor" web site, you'll find the following verbiage:

The National Guard recognizes and values the unique skills, abilities, and character that homeschoolers can bring to our organization. Homeschoolers are known for their high levels of cooperation, assertiveness, empathy and self-control. The values that homeschooled young men and women hold will naturally mesh with the Army Values.

Homeschoolers are known for high levels of what? Who was surveyed to compile this list of traits for which homeschoolers, collectively, are known? And what is this cooperative assertiveness? This empathic self-control? These values and traits might as well have been picked from an arbitrary list for all they have to do with homeschoolers as a group. Homeschoolers are not a monolithic group full of identical robots. They are certainly not a unified army of cooperatively assertive little empaths.



Now, there are traits that homeschoolers *do* all have in common. Traits like the ability to work independently, a level of comfort with being outside the mainstream, a tendency to think past what's expected and deconstruct the status quo. I am not a military person myself but I would feel safe in betting those are not characteristics for which the Army is actively searching.

Here's another ripe quote from the Army National Guard's pitch to homeschoolers:

The National Guard is a natural choice for innovative young men and women who pursue unconventional avenues to succeed.

Yeah. That's the army. Unconventional.

I am not against the military. I know lots of people, including my husband, who found military service to be a very positive thing. However, I must call cowdung on this ridiculous recruiting language, which both misrepresents the experience a recruit can expect to have (It'll be just like homeschooling! But with money for college!) and misrepresents the recruit him or herself. If homeschoolers want to join the Army National Guard, good for them. But do we have to make them a special "Path of Honor" with their own fake, patronizing reasons for joining up?

Would you join the army because you're unconventional and empathic? What kind of nonsense is this?

Teaching the Odyssey to Children: The Final Battle

The final battle in the Odyssey is an extremely action-packed story that can be very very fun to act out! You will need:

A simple bow -- one that is large enough to be very difficult for the children to string.
Enough foamy swords for everyone.
Do not bring any real arrows!

1. Hide all the swords in the wine cellar.
2. Everyone is now a suitor, but someone is Odysseus in disguise! We don't know who! Pick the biggest, strongest, tallest student to go last.








3. Have all the suitors try to string the bow. With any luck, only the biggest, strongest kid will get it strung. If it doesn't go that way, just improvise. I had two Odysseuses in the same class, and it worked out fine!
4. Once Odysseus strings the bow, take the bow away and now you become Odysseus. Act out how he transformed back into his glorious strong radiant form, and immediately shot one of the suitors in the throat. Wow! Action! Intensity!
5. Now someone needs to sneak down to the wine cellar and arm the suitors! Have one of the students hand out the swords quickly while Odysseus is making hay with his bow!
6. When everyone is armed, say that they can all try to kill you with their foam swords while you count backwards from 20 to 1. Hopefully, you will survive. If you yell "No killing on the face!" a few times in between counting, you should be alright. But you might want to remove all glasses from you and the children before engaging in this battle.





This activity was planned and executed at our homeschool co-op, Homeschool Out of the Box, for my elementary literature class on The Odyssey. For more of my Odyssey ideas and plans, click on the Odyssey tag at the bottom of the post.

Teaching the Odyssey to Children: Weaving like Penelope

Every day Penelope worked on her tapestry, and every night she picked out the stitches. She promised the suitors that she would marry one of them just as soon as she got done with the tapestry, but she never got done!

It's very easy for children to weave on a simple loom that you can construct out of cardboard or plastic. For a rectangular piece, notch the top and bottom of the rectangle. Set up the loom by starting the yarn at the bottom, then going up to the first notch on top, over one notch, back down, over one, back up, etc. until you get to the end. Wrap the end around the last notch, put a yarn needle on the leftover yarn, and you're ready to start weaving! Do a few rows on each loom to get the kids going and give them an idea over over-under-over-under, and make sure they know that the stitches alternate by rows. So if you went over it last time, you're going under it this time.

You can also make a circular loom -- we used empty soup containers -- or a loom that goes on the back and front of a rectangle at the same time by winding the yarn over the back side too.

Here is a page with really great instructions on making homemade looms out of recycled materials.

And here are some pictures of our Penelopes. They enjoyed the project very much and it even spilled over into lunch time:









This activity was planned and executed at our homeschool co-op, Homeschool Out of the Box, for my elementary literature class on The Odyssey. For more of my Odyssey ideas and plans, click on the Odyssey tag at the bottom of the post.

Teaching the Odyssey to Children: Trench Surprise

When the Greeks went to the Underworld, they had specific instructions from Circe for how to give the ghosts life and health. If they prepared this special concoction, and allowed the ghosts to drink it, the ghosts could gain human form and speech. They were to dig a trench and fill it up with the stuff ghosts just loooove to eat. So, here's the recipe:

Blood (21st century Greeks may substitute ketchup)
Honey
Milk
Wine (Again, grape juice is an acceptable substitute for Greeks under 21)
Grain (We used corn meal for allergy reasons)

The exact ratio of ingredients is unspecified in the text but we just used a lot of everything.

For this activity you will need the following:

One trench. We used a long kind of tupperware-ish thing.
The four trench ingredients
Enough little glass bottles to hold some trench mix for each kid. With CORKS!
A ladle
A turkey baster
Creepy face paint.
Index cards
Markers
Tape



Before you start, have the children use the index cards, markers and tape to create the labels for their bottles. They should use a name like "Trench Surprise!" or "Trench Soup!" or something like that. Then set the bottles aside.

Divide your class up into ghosts and Greeks. On the ghost side you will need: Tiresias, Odysseus' mother, and Achilles. Paint up your ghosts' faces with creepy paint. On the Greek side you'll need Odysseus and enough Greeks to hold all the ingredients. So, here's how it goes.

1. Establish your trench -- put the ghosts on one side of it and the Greeks on the other.





2. Odysseus orders his Greeks to put their ingredients into the trench. As they come up one by one, you sit next to the trench and mix it together. Encourage everyone to be completely grossed out by the smell, the sight, and everything. Loudly yell "EWWWW!"







3. Have the ghosts come around sniffing hungrily and drooling and begging for a drink of what's in the trench. Odysseus must refuse all but Tiresias.

4. Let Tiresias get a big "drink" of trench and then say his bit about not eating up the sun god's cows.



5. Let the other ghosts come up and have a go at the jug.





6. When it's all over, use the turkey baster to put a little bit of "trench soup" into everyone's bottle. Cork FIRMLY. Tell the children NOT to let the bottles tip over, seriously. You do not want that stuff loose in a book bag. Of course if they want to uncork it once they get home, that's the parents' problem. *cackle*

The children enjoyed this activity very very much. As with everything else that's valuable and fun, it was a pain in the bottom to set up and clean up, but it was so totally worth it.

This activity was planned and executed at our homeschool co-op, Homeschool Out of the Box, for my elementary literature class on The Odyssey. For more of my Odyssey ideas and plans, click on the Odyssey tag at the bottom of the post.

Teaching the Odyssey to Children: Blind Tiresias Drawings

The episode in the Underworld can be a gruesome, gory read. We tried to lighten the mood by doing "Blind Tiresias" drawings. Here's what you'll need:

Blindfolds
White charcoal (available in the drawing section at a craft/art store)
Black cardstock

You could do it with white chalk but white charcoal is much nicer.

1. Show the students a picture of Tiresias and give them a little backstory on him. Tiresias is an awesome character to use when teaching how one figure can appear in multiple stories, with different purposes. Classical authors had no problem sharing characters and overlapping storylines. Why? Because these stories are based in oral traditions and myths, and characters like Tiresias the blind prophet can pop up all over the place. A good run-down on Tiresias can be found here with pictures. I love to point out places where texts can be deconstructed and the kids can kind of see beyond the page, and I find that even a six-year-old can understand this stuff, especially when you relate it to a character like "the wicked stepmother" or "the orphan who becomes a prince" etc.

2. Blindfold them. Make a big deal about checking if they can see or not, but if there are kids that get freaked out by being blindfolded, leave them a crack.

3. Pass out the materials, preferably after the kids are blindfolded, so that it will be a surprise when they see black paper and white chalk.

4. Ask them to draw Tiresias. Let hilarity ensue.







5. Some kids will cheat, and peek! That's okay! Accuse them loudly and angrily, and then move on! Bring lots of paper so that the cheaters have an opportunity to start over with virtue and a more secure blindfold

6. Some kids will not cheat, and their pictures will turn out funny:





This activity was planned and executed at our homeschool co-op, Homeschool Out of the Box, for my elementary literature class on The Odyssey. For more of my Odyssey ideas and plans, click on the Odyssey tag at the bottom of the post.

Homeschool Camp-In at the Virginia Air and Space Center

What a fantastic program. Seriously, if you get a chance to do this, do it. It was so much fun.

This was the program, for the 4th and 5th grade class that Benny was in:

1. Stomp rockets. They made stomp rockets with foam tubes, plastic eggs, paper and tape. Their teacher gave them freedom to do whatever they liked with the fins. Then they went out in the big part of the museum and did many many launches, trying to stomp their rockets, trying to get them into the pickle buckets that had been set up as "planets." Very cool! Here they are working on the rockets:



2. Mars Colony. The teacher talked about how a Mars Colony would need different parts to survive and support itself -- a science and research center, a recreation center, a food and shelter center, and... I can't remember the other one! But the kids were divided into teams and given boxes with different cool materials to create their section of the colony. Then they each gave a little presentation about their creations.

3. Robots. The kids got to build cool robots with Robotix parts, giant beautiful bins of all kinds of parts and motors. After they'd built their robots and figured out how to make them go forward, backward, and turn, they had robot wars where they played a type of soccer with the robots -- trying to push a little block off a table through a goal before their opponent did. This was FUN!

Practicing:



Robot war:



4. Space Freeze. The children went out of their classroom to see a cool demonstration with liquid nitrogen. Everyone loves liquid nitrogen! Here's Benny getting to freeze a carnation and then crush it up. Very enjoyable.



5. Rockets. After the demo, we went back to the classroom and built real actual model rockets with real actual parts. This was very exciting! There was feverish measuring, gluing, and decorating. Then we left the rockets there, to be fueled and launched in the morning.

6. Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream. At 10 pm, the longsuffering and wonderful ladies in charge of this event made ice cream in the cafe using liquid nitrogen in huge buckets of cream and sugar. The kids LOVED this. Here's a picture of the concoction being made:



Finally it was time to bed down for the night. I had brought the air mattress, at great cost to my convenience in dragging all our stuff in from the car. I had also remembered the air pump, amazingly enough. However, I did not remember to *charge* the lousy, pea-pickin' air pump, and so it immediately died when I turned it on. I did experience a moment of sadness, yea in the midst of this very exciting and valuable educational event, when I realized I would be sleeping on the cement floor of the museum, protected only by my great grandmother's quilt.

Fortunately, my socially adept son procured a pump for us by asking other people with air mattresses, and we were in business. Benny pumped it up himself, with his foot. The children were allowed to pick anywhere in the museum to sleep, including under airplane wings, next to space capsules, and all kinds of exotic locales. Benny chose to set up next to the Christmas tree that was decorating the museum. Nice and bright, all night. Okay, so here is our campsite:



Here was my view, looking up, when I woke up in the morning. This bank of windows probably had something to do with the fact that I was cold all night:



Apart from my anti-camping whining, the experience was quite wonderful. And the best part of all was the next morning when we launched the rockets. I have a video, but it's still on my camera. Here's the picture I took with my phone:



Thank you, huge and amazed thank you to Louise Schaeffler and the Virginia Air and Space Center for a program that went far above and beyond my expectations. There were families that had come from as far as Lynchburg, and it was totally worth it! A brilliant job by the teachers and organizers, and a wonderful experience for the children. Please do this again -- we will be back!

G.U.E.S.S. Homeschool Science Fair

We mad scientist mommies have been working our test tubes off getting together the first annual Get Up and Explore Science Spectacular (G.U.E.S.S.) Homeschool Science Fair! If you'd like to learn more click here: Homeschool Science Fair. If you live in the Tidewater area and are a reader of this blog, I invite you to sign up. This is our "beta" year, so we're definitely working out the kinks, including online registration, generating sponsors, acquiring judges, and refining our guidelines. Next year we're planning to go even bigger, and hold the fair earlier in the year so that our winner can go on to the regional event in this area. If you'd like to be a part, please register by Monday, so we can finalize our list of entries. Updates coming soon!