Thursday History Day

This morning started out very rocky. Today was the morning Dad woke up the girls early so they would finish cleaning their rooms before school because they chose not to the night before. Apparently, however, Elli woke up with a bad cold. So when I went down the hall fully expecting them to be awake and organizing, they were sleeping. Martin had left, I had showered and dressed, and they had gone back to sleep. Sheesh. I didn't know Elli didn't feel well, she didn't say anything to me and both girls just said "okay Mom, I'm up, I'll do it." I went downstairs to start breakfast and checked on them about 8:30, expecting them to come eat. They were not cleaning their rooms. They had until 9. Were they just procrastinating? Still no communication from Elli about not feeling well. After checking in with Marty, we docked them a week's allowance when they indeed missed their 9:00 deadline. I gave an extra half hour (started as 15 min but since their rooms were really trashed, I made it 30 min) and said if it wasn't done, they'd be docked another week's allowance. It wasn't done. Good grief! Finally another 30 minutes later and they finally came down to a breakfast of baked apples with cream and a special dried fruit/nut filling made from Trader Joe's confetti trail mix, and hot tea. That's when I noticed Elli looking terrible. Couldn't tell if it was from crying (someone was upstairs) or a cold....Anyway. They did their morning work, and after cutting out the morning break from the schedule, we weren't really that behind.
For History, Grace and I worked on the timeline, while Elli looked up informational maps about the Roman Empire. We made a salt dough map of Europe/The Middle East and colored in a paper map according to topography. We will be marking important cities on it tomorrow, label the terrain as best as possible, and on one of them maybe map out the spread of Christianity...This was all from a question in the book..."How did these different terrains and climates affect the ability of the Roman Empire to conquer and control the native people groups?" I think we need to do more reporting. Hands on is fun but I need to see Elli doing more.... She'll probably blow us away next week with some incredible epic poem that synthesizes all this information. If so, I'll lighten up and not stress. But until then, I get all panicky: what if we're just having fun and they're not actually learning anything????
But the salt dough map is really cool. Humongous! It's about the size of the oven rack. It's just on foil. And it's still not cooked all the way! Grace liked it "really fine. It was really fun." Elli thought it was pretty cool and learned how to use an index better as she looked up various maps for us to model after. Overall, we survived the day.