This morning we dressed up as Ancient Romans and learnt about how they lived all them years ago. The intention was to be Roman Emperors and then dress as Gladiators just for the fighting, but we ended up with a mixture of costumes.
To begin we looked at Roman numerals, and as Noah said they look like letters. I used the chalk board and then the boys tried to copy the numbers themselves. Roman numerals was the original number system used in Ancient Europe before the introduction of the Arabic system we use today (0, 1, 2, 3…).
Ancient Romans loved art, and in particular mosaics, so we made our own mosaic pictures using black and coloured card. The Ancient Romans however often done mosaics on large scales, covering floors, walls and even ceilings.
They didn’t just decorate their walls with mosaics though, they were also big fans of graffiti, but not like the graffiti we have today. Instead they would carve pictures and patterns into walls, so we went outside and practised our of graffiti with some chalk on the fence.
After we had finished being creative we thought about other things the Ancient Romans done for fun, they loved bloody sports like hunting, and in particular gladiator fighting. The boys enjoyed this part a lot, pretending to be gladiators and fighting each other. Although gladiators largely fought other gladiators and convicted criminals, it wasn’t always the case, sometimes they fought fierce animals such as lions, bears and crocodiles. Gladiators were normally slaves and belonged to a master. There were even some female gladiators.
The ancient Romans also enjoyed the theatre and playing games, a popular game of the time was ‘Knucklebones‘. This was played with 5 small objects, originally the knuckles of sheep and goats (hence the name) and is similar to the game we know today as ‘Jacks’. We don’t have any Jacks, and we certainly don’t have any sheep ankles knocking about, so we used some small pieces of ‘K’NEX’ instead.
All that learning made us hungry so we thought about what the Ancient Romans liked to eat, they ate lots of things we eat today like bread, wheat, fish, meat, vegetables and fruits, but they also ate strange things like door mice. Not really in the mood for mice we found an Ancient Roman pancake recipe online. We found quite a few, and they were all quite similar, so we went for this one in the end and halved it. Even halving the recipe we still made 10! Now they were alright, the boys loved them (but then they’ve eaten some questionable things in the past), but I think I might stick to a more modern pancake recipe in future. It was fun to try though.
Fun fact, or as Noah said, disgusting: The Ancient Romans used to wash their clothes in wee.
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