For the past three weeks, Casia has been studying Ancient Rome. This is right on the tail of her Ancient Greek unit, and there is so much overlap, I think it's helping bring history into perspective. Rarely do these events happen in a vacuum and it's great that she gets to see how something she learned previously fits into this puzzle of history.
We had such success with the videos bringing life to history during our Greek unit that I'm relying heavily on them this time around as well. We watched this very cool documentary by Nova called Secrets of Lost Empires II: Roman Bath. In it, a team of historians, engineers and architects try to recreate an actual Roman Bath. Casia loves architecture, so this really appealed to her.
Another great film that covered an essential Roman study topic was a BBC production called Colosseum: A Gladiator's Story. It tells the story of a famous gladiator, Verus, who went from slavery to freedom and also includes a few details on the building of the Colosseum.
We also started watching a video series produced by the History Channel called Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire. This is a very thorough (and by thorough, I also mean long) depiction of the entire history of Rome. The first 3.5 hours of disc 1 (of a set of 4) felt like it left little out. I fell asleep at one point (but I was sick that day, so I'm sure that was the reason) and on many instances I caught Casia watching the clock. She also asked how long until all the fighting stuff was done. Sadly, I had to inform her that most of ancient Rome's history involves killing and maiming, even in politics. All that being said, I do think it's an extremely well done series (though very violent), I'm just not sure it's right for Casia.
So I decided to look elsewhere and found this other series. It's by PBS and Rome's history is encompassed in four short 55 minute episodes. Sold! (That's figurative, we watched it for free on Hulu.) It's entitled Empires: Order from Chaos. There was a bit of overlap between this and the other video, but since it wasn't very long, we just kept plugging along. That is until it got to the point at which it started talking about the reasons Augustus Caesar decided to banish his daughter, Julia, from Rome. They started by reading some translation of Ovid's poetry of love. Fortunately, even with Casia's advanced reading ability, she completely lacks any worldly knowledge to have made much sense of the very graphic lyrics (and I, hating the idea of censoring educational sources, but still a mother sitting next to her 9 year old, began talking loudly over the narration). As if it that wasn't bad enough, all of a sudden, they flashed images of ancient Roman mosaics depicting... well, let's just say my hand was up in front of her face faster than I could spurt out the words, "Cover your eyes!".
It was PBS! I so wasn't prepared for this. Afterwards, I mentioned to Casia that I thought maybe we shouldn't watch the rest of this series and she suggested going back to the other one. I asked, "So you liked that one?" And she replied, "I liked it better than having your hand over my eyes and having to stick my fingers in my ears singing 'la-la-la-la-la'."
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