Ancient Egypt -lesson 1

Yesterday we had our first lesson on Ancient Egypt. D. is also studying it at our home option program school, but he is not very talkative on what they were doing there exactly aside from "the map", so I decided to start from scratch and see how it goes.

I use Core Knowledge lessons plans from the teacher's guide (courtesy of our home option program) as well as a number of books. There are fantastic web resources too. Our topic yesterday was introduction and the Nile river and its importance for ancient Egyptians.

We read our Core Knowledge book to get the general idea. We located Egypt on the map and discussed the meaning of "delta", lower and upper Egypt and how the country was formed along the river and was indeed very narrow. We also looked through the Eyewitness Encyclopedia (we love the whole series, the information is very well presented and it got a poster inside with brief recaps and photos that we hanged on the wall). We also looked at this website to understand what was going on during flood (it got  great interactive presentation).

I found a great book with lots of projects on the topic, as well as questions to ponder.
The little project we did was a Reed boat. It's quite easy to make- grab a handful of long grass (6-8''/15-20 cm long), fresh or dry. Tie the grass with string at the edges leaving a little bit of extra grass, which should be then cut into a point. Bend the grass and gently stretch it outward in the middle to make a hammock shape.
We put it to float into a baking pan made of glass. A little bit of blue tissue underneath the pan gave a feeling of blue water. Lots of fun for kiddos, they blue on this boat to make it turn, they blew on the water to make a current, they put acorns in it (they gave acorns faces using a sharpie). The boat did get really wet eventually, but it still floated after drying overnight. Great project.