In which Hannah learns about the hierarchy of classification of living things

This was the topic on her online biology course last week and we wanted to make something to help her remember it. The fact that there are seven levels involved lent itself to something rainbow, which Hannah really likes to do where possible.

So we chose seven different colour pieces of card and found different round things to draw round (various sized plates, jar lids etc) to give us circles of increasing size. Hannah wrote the name of the level and some examples of it, using humans as the species. In the end, it looked like this:

Species: Homo Sapiens

Genus: Homo

Family: Hominidae

Order: Primates

Class: Mammalia (excuse the spelling of humAns)

Phylum: Chordata

Kingdom: Animalia

Honestly, those are rainbow colours. The class one looks grey but is in fact bright yellow!

The whole thing looked like this when it was finished.

In which we recreate the Rosetta Stone in chocolate

Hannah and I went to the British Museum a couple of weeks ago and looked at the Rosetta Stone, amongst other things (although mainly she sat and chatted with her friends Z and S). She got a set of hieroglyph stamps for Christmas from her Auntie Kathryn and it occurred to me we could use them to do some kind of project on the Rosetta Stone. It fairly soon afterwards occurred to me that chocolate would make a splendid medium for this project.

So today we embarked on this piece of work. First, I created a short quiz about the Rosetta Stone, helped the girls find books that might help them find the answers (yes, I created the quiz by googling it but I made them use books....research skills are useful!).
 

H and L looking for quiz answers

We then melted two bars of Dairy Milk and spread the chocolate thinly over a layer of greaseproof paper in a baking tray. We tried stamping it with the hieroglyphs immediately but that was a disaster as all the stamps got completely stuck in the chocolate and the only way to release them was to eat the chocolate around them.....oh hang on...."disaster" and "had to eat the chocolate" clearly don't belong together. Anyway, it didn't work that way in anything other than a brief snack kind of way. I put it in the fridge and let it chill until it was almost solid and then we tried again with the stamps. This time it worked...huzzah! The girls then looked at websites that showed them demotic and Greek scripts and wrote a line of each underneath the hieroglyphs.

Chocolate Rosetta Stone

The girls did learn that the writing on the original is a decree from a pharoah. This says nothing in particular, it was just to show the three scripts. And to have fun with chocolate. We've now eaten it and it was very tasty!