Nomads Game - Story of the World Activity

I recently started reading The Story of the World Volume 1: Ancient Times to L and E (34 months).  Before we went on vacation, we discussed history and archeology, and today we read about how ancient people were nomads.  I made up a simple Nomad Game, which the girls were very excited to play after dinner.  I wanted them to know that ancient people lived in caves, hunted and gathered food, and moved from place to place when the food ran out.  So that's exactly what we did...

I set up "caves" all around the house for the girls to 'live in'.  In each area of the house, I also put out 'food' for them to gather, such as nuts and berries, leaves, and small lizards and snakes:

In case you are wondering what my lovely kids are wearing, I convinced them to make their own clothes from animal hides (baby blankets), just like ancient people - this was the only way I could get them to put something on (needless to say, their makeshift outfits made it tricky to get good photos of our game).

Once we gathered all the food in the area, we put it in our soup:

I didn't rush this part, since the girls absolutely love to pretend they are cooking.  They practiced their fine-motor transferring skills with some spoons. 

When the food ran out in the area, we had to go to a new area (new room in the house), and find a new cave to live in and more food to eat.

The kids really liked playing in the caves.  When E asked for paints, I realized that this was the perfect time to do some cave painting (this is the suggested activity in the Story of the World Activity Guide, not my own idea):

The cave painting involved painting on unfolded and crumpled-up brown lunch bags. I told the girls about some of the things that people painted on caves like animals that they hunted, and made my own cave painting with some people hunting antelope (too embarrassing to show my artwork here).  E painted a giraffe, and L painted some people.  I let them have fun and experiment with the painting. 

When their Daddy came upstairs, L and E were very excited to tell him about the Nomad Game.  When I asked L what nomads were, she said that they were people who looked for different caves and found food.  I love when dramatic play and learning come together!