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Tuesday, August 26, 2008

A Little Plug for Homeschooling..and Etsy



The area where we live now is drenched and wind blown from the recent tropical storm Fay. Schools were cancelled and businesses closed due to weather, but our little home school pressed on.

One of my favorite subjects is history and our son is currently studying Ancient Rome. At this point in his studies he is learning about games children played and the toys they played with. Thus the above project was born. These are trigons, originally balls made of whatever you can get your hands on. As you can see our two youngest made three balls, each with different centers but each wrapped in the same type cloth. In his studies D learned that the game trigon was played much like hot potatoes with the players - trigonalias - standing in a triangle and tossing the ball around to each other.

This brought me to another type of ball and a different culture. Tiny beautiful balls that Asian mothers used to give to their children at birthdays and special holidays. These tiny balls were made of threads collected from the children's kimonos as they outgrew them. The threads were gently and lovingly wrapped until a ball was formed then beautiful designs were woven into them and the ball was placed in the crib of the young child for special occasions. The temari ball
was a beautiful reminder of the love of a mother and child. I saw these modern Temari balls on ETSY last week and loved the story behind these little handmade jewels. What a sweet tradition.

Our homeschooling allowed us to make beautiful crafts and ETSY provided us with a look into yet another family tradition and our bout with Fay could not stop our learning about other cultures. All this and Math, Reading, Science and Phonics too. Life is Good!!!

VeryVerdant

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi! I just stumbled across your blog and your link back to my Etsy shop! Thank you!! What an honor to be included in your homeschooling adventure. I am also a homeschool mom (in our 16th year now!) and love the way you made history come alive!

Blessings, Julie T.
http://julieandco.etsy.com

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