Terra Cotta Army

Image via Wikipedia

We have had beautiful weather here all week. When the weather is so nice, the last thing I, or Dakota, wants to do is sit inside and do schoolwork. Wednesday was one of those days when Dakota was giving me a hard time about school. I suggested he go sit outside while writing his spelling words.

I gave him a few minutes to get started and then I joined him outside. We sat there and talked while he worked on his words. He was rambling on about anything and everything BESIDES what he was actually supposed to be doing. I was sitting there, kicked back in the lawn chair with my eyes closed, just taking in the sunshine and all of a sudden he asked me if I knew the name of the Chinese Emperor who had his whole army buried with him?

"Excuse me? Can you repeat that question?"

He says "Yeah, I heard somewhere that there is this Chinese Emperor who was afraid his enemy was going to get him in the afterlife so he had his whole entire army buried with him in a mass grave."

I looked at Dakota with skepticism and asked "Are you making this up? Or is this some myth thing you heard?"

He assured me it was the real thing. Now...this is one of the parts I absolutely LOVE about homeschooling! I said "Okay, go google it and see what you can find." So off we both went to the computer. It took Dakota about 5-10 minutes of searching before he came upon the whole story of Emperor Qin's Terracotta Army (7,000 life-size sculpted clay terracotta soldiers, chariots, and horses.) We spent the next hour reading about it, watching youtube videos and looking at pictures. This was so interesting and I had never heard of this before.

When we got done, Dakota said "I just love stuff like this, ya know...history stuff."

I included a link and a youtube video if you are interested in learning about Emperor Qin...by the way, he is the same man who created the first version of the Great Wall of China.