Story of the World History Co-Op: Ch 1, Roman Standard

Last week started our first official week of school, although I think the only thing that makes it official is it was the start of our co-op class!  Our full school load doesn’t start until after labor day when we add in science, grammar, and spelling.

I started my own history co-op at my friend’s house on Fridays.  We’re doing Story of the World Vol 2: Middle Ages.  While this is supposed to be for 2-4th grade, we started history in Kindergarten so it will be Green Bubbles 1st grade year.  I loved Story of the World last year but, at the end of the year, I kept thinking how many of the wonderful projects we kept skipping over.  He loves the hands on activities.  So, I started the co-op as a way to make sure we keep the fun in history and do the hands on that is so easy to skip.

Chapter 1 is a review of the Roman Empire.  Or the fall of it.  For our project this week we followed projects straight from the activity manual and colored flying carpets.

SOTW Vol 2 Roman Standard Co-op Project

The highlight was the Roman standards though.  We have a full class at 6 students ranging from 4 to 9 years old and everyone really liked this.  Green Bubbles was very proud of his standard and I loved seeing how different all the kids made theirs.

I printed up some pictures of real, historical Roman standards for the kids to view so they would have a reference for what they were making.  One of the oldest kids in our class actually used my gold sharpie to make the little ‘medal’ disks look just like the ones in the photos!  Other supplies we used… Cardboard mailing tubes (I bought a huge box of them from a local shipping store since we have other projects coming up using these), cardboard box, cardstock, tin foil, and yarn that we never used!

Helpful advice, this project took a bit longer then I was expecting.  It probably could have easily taken up the full hour by itself and the kids were a little rushed through it.  Hot glue would work a LOT better then white glue on our cardboard tubes.  They were to thick and the glue was taking a long time to dry.  Even staples didn’t go through the tube. We didn’t even get to the yarn to decorate the standards, or write anything on the cross bar, but the kids still had a lot of fun and didn’t notice those details were missing.  Green Bubbles decided he didn’t want to do those anyway when we were at home.

I’m going to try and post our projects each week because I’ve noticed a lack of activities to draw inspiration from.  Hopefully my tips will be useful for someone else!