How to make a Roman mosaic out of candy

As we moved through history, we paused in our trek through Mystery of History 2 (affiliate link) to learn more about Romans.  There’s a bunch of hands on lessons I wanted the kids to have a chance with, and there was no way we could do that progressing at our normal pace.

Side note, you should see how some of my Illuminations (affiliate link) schedules look by the end of the week, I write all sorts of kooky notes on them, and scribble stuff, and draw arrows.

I bring that up because to have room in our schedule, which is all too often packed ridiculously full, I doubled up one week of history to get a bunch done, and crammed in as much of the “book learning” as I could into one week, so we had a glorious week of unplanned awesomeness to do.

But the plague went through our house, that’s another story, but I just wanted to say, that’s the beauty of flexibility in homeschooling.

 

Back to Roman Mosaics

(I’m talking on Thursday night about teaching active/distracted kids, and you can see why I NEED to know about this topic)

I gathered all of the small bits of candy I had to make our mosaics, and plates, because while it would be even cooler mortared onto a sugar cookie, I didn’t want to make cookies right then.

After taunting the kids with all of those little bowls of candy, I hauled them over to the computer to look at pictures of Roman mosaics I took this summer at the Art Institute of Chicago.  If you’ve never been there, I highly recommend it.

As you can see animals and every day life were a common theme in mosaics.  You can also tell the colors are somewhat washed out, and aren’t as bright as our candy.  From everything I’ve read in their day these were very bright and vibrant colors, if you look at the restoration of some classic Renaissance artwork you can see how colors fade and change through time.

The kids set to work, and happily built their creations as we talked about what they were building and why they were making those particular mosaics.

Art can be a great glimpse into what you’re kids are thinking and they’re a great time to talk with your kids because everyone is forced to slow down and think about what they’re doing.

Everyohne’s final product.  The mostly blue one is Superman’s it’s a clone trooper.  The orange and yellow one is mine, it’s a volcano erupting (I had Pompeii in mind).  Princess has the purple one that is a dolphin jumping in the air.  Batman just had fun building a mosaic.

Of course, you have to eat the evidence, it wouldn’t do for anyone to know, you’d had that much sugar.

 

linking up to:

History and Geography over at All Things Beautiful (finally got a history post written)

 

for more Rome ideas check out my Rome to Reformation board.

Follow Ticia Adventures in Mommydom’s board Mystery of History 2 on Pinterest.