Learning about the Stone Age

We have spent the last couple of weeks learning about the Stone Age. We are following the 'Story of the World' curriculum for history, which is the only curriculum we follow (apart from maths). I really like the 'Story of the World' curriculum. It comes with two books; a reading book and an activity book. 

Story of the World history curriculum

We started by reading chapter 2 in the book which is all about the Stone Age, the earliest period in human culture where stones were widely used to make tools. It talks about a family living in the Stone Age and explains how they live, rather like story. I really like this approach as it is interesting for the children to hear about things in story-form. We heard about how a Stone Age family lived in tents and hunted for food.  

Next, we used a few pages from the activity book. The first was a map of the Fertile Crescent where some of the first towns were created (before this people had had to wander from place to place in search of food.) The children coloured the Fertile Crescent in green, it is the spot between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates. These Rivers were what made the land so fertile. Because this land was good for growing crops, people came to settle here and become self-sustainable. They built more permanent accommodation. Jericho, coloured in blue, was one of the first cities.

We learnt about  how the shaduf was used to extract water from the river.

Stone Age cave painting craft

Next, we did some cave painting. I gave the children some brown paper bags which I had opened up. They were given red, white, yellow, black and brown paint.

K had good fun joining in.

I told the children about the kinds of things that would have been painted on cave walls such as animals and scenes of hunting.

This is K's attempt. He always likes to join in with activities the older children are doing if he can!

R's painting.

D's cave painting.

Stone Age salt dough necklaces

For our last activity, we decided to get creative with some salt dough. The children made some bones with holes in to thread onto string as a necklace. We also made rocks for our Stonehenge model. I will be writing about Stonehenge in another post.

K tried to roll the pieces of salt dough into balls.

D made some pieces of salt dough into tooth shapes.

The children enjoyed making teeth and balls of bone.

We put all the pieces of salt dough onto a baking tray and put them in the oven to bake for around 2 hours.

Once the beads were cool, we threaded them on to pipe cleaners. This seemed the easiest way as the wire inside could go through the beads easily.

Then we tied some string to the ends of the pipe cleaners to make the necklaces long enough to wear. Above is D's necklace. The flowers and stars are probably not authentic, but she used her artistic license here!

R made a more authentic necklace using teeth and round beads.

Here is R wearing his necklace. He loves it!