We have finished a block on Geometry, Ecology/Biomes/Mineralogy and Ancient Rome so far.  We started Physics this week, and still have quite a bit left for the school year, including European Geography, Medieval History, Business Math and hopefully a few weeks to fit in a small block on American Colonial History.  Hopefully we will continue to move at a careful and steady pace through this semester and finish up all we need to finish!

Ancient Rome was a block that I have laid out in some detail regarding resources, and what we read and did here  https://theparentingpassageway.com/2013/11/20/sixth-grade-ancient-rome/  and here:  https://theparentingpassageway.com/2013/12/16/sixth-grade-ancient-rome-2/

Here is the title page for the first main lesson book of Rome:

I mentioned in a previous post that we began with the story of The Aenid.  This drawing was done completely in hatching, and took quite a long time to accomplish.  There was no outlining at all.  Hatching is worked on in the Waldorf curriculum beginning in the fourth grade, and I think you can start to see the fruition of that technique in these more complex drawings in the sixth grade:

We worked on maps of the Seven Hills of Rome and painting the Seven Hills of Rome:

We then moved into such things as “Horatius Keeps  The Bridge” in painting, and the crossing of the Alps by Hannibal:

We did some black and white drawings in pencil (not charcoal, although we will be doing charcoal drawings this semester) with shading from the book detailed in one of the previous posts “When The World Was Rome.”  In the Waldorf curriculum, it is important to get adolescents to work with grey areas of shading.  The suggestion of drawing from photographs of busts was in the Christopherus Roman History Unit Guide, and I recommend it.  Portraiture is difficult, and really comes into play more eighth grade and high school from what I understand, but it was a worthy endeavor.

Here is our daughter’s Julius Caesar and my Julius Caesar:

Here is our daughter’s Augustus Caesar and my Augustus Caesar:

Many of the longer summaries were broken up with borders of Roman mosaics.  The best book for this is this one:

Here is a Roman soldier:

At the end of this block, we also made a very detailed freehand map of the Roman Empire at its height, and then penciled in the routes of all the invading groups during the decline of the Roman Empire.  We finished by reading “Augustine Came to Kent” and will be reading Peter Dickinson’s “The Dancing Bear” in preparation for our next block of history, the Medieval Ages.

Many blessings,

Carrie