One of the things I love most about home educating is the fact we can be really spontaneous.  So when we were finishing off our Romans topic this week we were learning about why, where and how they built their roads.

During our research we found out they used a groma which was a Roman surveying instrument, to help them build them in straight lines.

Spontaneous head on I asked ‘would you like to make a groma Elsa’?

‘Yes please’ came the excited reply (anything to get out of writing). 🙂

So we discussed what we would need to make one and collected everything together.

Firstly, Elsa created her cross beams (out of cardboard) and used wool to fix them together.  She then made a hole at the end of each of the pieces of card.

She put a piece of wool at through the holes in the card to hang the weights off.  She created 4 weights out of clay and took bits off them to ensure it was straight.

Using her knowledge of Roman numerals she wrote the date 🙂

I’m not sure if this is exactly how you used it in Roman times, however Elsa put it up high so she could see when the opposite weights were in a straight line.

This was great fun to make and we used it to see if it worked.  It did 🙂