Mosaic art project.

Our first project for Ancient Rome was learning about mosaic art.  
I found sooooo many different projects to choose from but we could not do them all so we all decided on a mosaic made from eggshells.  Yep!  Eggshells!  This made for a very interesting piece of work AND it was made from something that was going to be discarded anyway.  So there is a lesson in recycling. 

We found the idea in this book.

You can see the example on the bottom of the page.

First, we washed and cleaned the eggshells very well and let them dry completely.

After they dry, you can paint them and let the paint dry.

While you wait for your paint to dry, you can lightly outline what ever you want to create on a poster-board type of paper.  Cardboard or cardstock will work also.

Once your paint has dried and you have your outline, you can put glue on small portions of your outline and then you break the eggshell carefully into smaller pieces and place them in the glue. 

Just keep going until you fill in your outline.

The book says to use paints to fill in the background so we used Dot paint markers which worked very well.

Let your mosaic dry completely and enjoy your work of art.

One of my favorite things is to see that both of my kids can take the same project, and there will be two totally different outcomes.  A real bonus in homeschooling.  I give them guidelines, and the are free to express themselves in the way that they want to instead of "lets all make the same thing". 

This is C11's mosaic.

This is A9's mosaic.

Here is an example from Wikipedia of a very popular mosaic that was displayed in the thresholds of many Roman villas.  You can see the words Cave canem written at the bottom which means "beware of the dog".  Interestingly enough, since we have been learning Latin, they already knew what these words meant.

Valete!