Byzantine Empire for Kids

Interior of the Hagia Sophia, Built 533-537 CE

Last week, we sped through the division and fall of the Roman Empire. We also learned about the Byzantine Empire for a couple of days.

Here are some links to images of Byzantine art that I found:
Images from the Hagia Sophia.
More images from the Hagia Sophia.
Istanbul, near the Great Palace.
A Gallery of Byzantine Images.

And here is a cool website all about mosaic art. It amazes me what can be done with tiles!!

Our hands-on project for this week was, of course, making our own mosaics. We used a salt-dough recipe from Learning Through History magazine. I should have followed it. We used whatever "stuff" we had available - beads, miscellaneous fake princess jewels, and mosaic pieces. While the outcome was pretty, nothing actually looked like a picture. I think we should have used the lentils/beans as was suggested and the end result would have looked more like an actual mosaic.

And we also used our old stand-by: Sticky Mosaics. They were much easier to clean up than the goopy dough we used for our homemade ones. I should have taken a picture of the aftermath of our mosaic project. There were beads everywhere And Kate accidentally dumped her mosaic - SPLAT on the floor.


We didn't do a read-aloud this week, because I wasn't quite prepared to dive completely into school yet. I am easing into it.

Ellie read (to herself):

Kate read (some to herself and some out loud to me):


I used Learning Through History Magazine (The Byzantine Empire) for projects and ideas.

We listened to the sections on the Fall of Rome and the Byzantine Empire on the Story of the World, Volume 2 CDs. I also read aloud from Mystery of History, Volume 2.

And what week of history would be complete without a Dover coloring book to keep the little ones busy while I read??