Friday, May 1, 2009

Night At The Museum History Unit - Sacagawea

We continued with our walk through the Night at the Museum today. We've already covered Theodore Roosevelt, and the T-Rex in part, though we have a few more activities for them. We had a handwriting exercise using a quote for President Roosevelt - "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

We also started work on coloring in the T-Rex mural we printed from http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/. Following the instructions, we are using oil based pastels. This is a first for us, and is proving to be messy, but fun. We completed about half of the coloring today, which is well ahead of where I thought we'd be.

We did manage to find time to watch the special features of the movie DVD, and we found out we were right - Rexy is smaller than a normal T-Rex. They wanted to be able to allow him to move freely through the museum, and a normal sized Tyrannosaurus Rex, would not fit. This did lead us to a nice story starter though. What would you do if had a Tyrannosaurus Rex for a pet?

Finally, we were ready for the introduction of the next character. We chose Sacagawea. For being so young, and so short lived, she left a large footprint on the history of this country. Living in Montana it's almost impossible turn around twice without bumping into something named after her.

We enjoyed a family movie night, and watched the PBS film, "Journey of Sacagawea", which we found at the library. We noticed that in Night at The Museum, Sacagawea is without husband and child. A fact which makes it easier to introduce a romance with Teddy Roosevelt (and after all, they're only supposed to be wax likenesses of the real people), but reduces the fortitude of her character.

We felt too, that the character's dress in the movie, while cute, was a little skimpy for her journey. So, we made some clothes for her (or a paper doll likeness - printed from www.100megsfree4.com/gogators4/sacagawea.html). We dyed our "clothes", which were made from white coffee filters, by smashing hyacinth and dandelions onto them. This of course, is not how plant dye is really made, and I don't think the Shoshone people would have used dandelion or hyacinth to make dye - but remember our quote from Theodore Roosevelt, "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

It's great to be a homeschooler!

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