Weekend fun

The fabulous thing about homeschooling is its flexibility and ability to bring a family together. Last weekend we got to enjoy both of these benefits on a little trip out to Camp Carter. For those of you who don't know, Camp Carter is a property that Graham's family owns out near Quitman, Arkansas where we all like to go play in the woods. They are building cabins there and we generally enjoy family time and nature hikes while we are there. So, it seemed the perfect place to get messy with a big project I had been planning for our Egyptian study.

After spending the morning with grandma and grandpa, Graham took the kids into the workshop to help them build wooden frames, which was a lot of fun to watch. They all did really well, but Evie seriously impressed Daddy with her skills. She was not at all afraid to put a little force behind that power drill and she handled it like a pro (well, like a pro who is only about 3 feet tall, but still...)

Once they were finished, the kids and I hiked down to the creek to begin the real point of all this: making mud bricks. We had been studying in Bible about how the Israelites were building cities for pharaoh out of mud bricks and I'm sure you all remember how one of the ways pharoah punished them when they asked to leave was by taking away their straw supply for the brick making. I always thought this meant they had to make bricks without straw, but actually, Exodus says they had to go find the straw themselves and still make thier expected quota of bricks, which considerably added to the length of their workday.

Well, we decided to see how hard thier work must have been by testing this out for ourselves. We started mixing mud in big buckets using a mixture of clay, soil and sand from the creek bed, water and straw. This alone turned out to be an extreme task. Not only does it take an enormous amount of mud, but a seriously strong arm to stir such a nasty mixture (did I mention the mud smelled incredibly foul since it held a lot of rotten leaves. The kids kept asking why it smelled like poop.) After all this, we finally decided it was ready (or at least that WE were ready to move on) and we began pouring/scooping the muddy mixture into the brick molds.

The first one was horribly sloppy and water seeped out of the bottom, trickling into pools that we now considered to be the equivalent of stinky booby traps. Moving on to the next brick we had a bit more success, but by the time we got to the third brick frame the mud was almost gone! We only had enough to fill it half way. (Did I mention these were giant buckets?)

So, here is what we learned through this messy adventure:
1. Brick making is hard work that would have to be perfected in order to ever make any substantial structure.
2. It takes a lot of work, time and physical stamina to make mud bricks (although a few thousand slaves would certainly make the job easier.)
3. Not only does it take a while to make the bricks, but it takes a lot longer for them to dry. One could argue that in Arkansas, they might never be dry. Good thing we have so many trees.
4. Homeschooling rocks!