Ancient Egypt-Round Up

I am a bad blogger lately, our days are much more demanding this year comparing to Kindergarten.

We did have a good Ancient Egypt Unit study though and I would very much like to share it here.

Lesson 1 and Lesson 2 were  posted on this blog earlier.

    Study Plan:

1. Geography of Ancient Egypt: locate on a map, talk about Nile river and its importance for a life in Ancient Egypt. Look at artwork from Ancient Egypt.
2. Talk about everyday life. Importance of flood. Typical occupations, food, clothing.
3. Talk about pharaohs, name the most important ones. Talk about Pyramids, palaces.
4. Discuss mummies.
5. Gods and Goddesses.Myths and legends.
6. Hieroglyphs
7. Overview
   

   Books about Ancient Egypt 

   
    
   
    

Anya's bookshelf: children-ancient-egypt







More of Anya's books »

Crafts

In addition to the crafts we did in our first two lessons we made:

1.Great pyramid. The Pyramid can be built out of cardboard or air-dry clay (in this case it is best to make walls thicker so the pyramid stands, use a nail to scratch marks on the surface. A small treasure can be buried inside during assembly.When the pyramid is dry it can be painted with acrylic or tempera paint and the tip can be decorated with glitter. 

  

 

 2. King Tut's portraits. Look at the picture of King Tut's mask, discuss details of the headpiece and other decorations, discuss and pick colors.

Portrait 1: Paint a Nemes (pharaoh's headpiece) on the newspaper using crayons and watercolors, set aside to dry. Paint Pharaoh's face on a large watercolor paper sheet, paint background, pay attention to the details such as colors and face features. When Nemes is dry cut it out and paste on pharaoh's head. How to draw King Tut tutorial can be found on Art Projects for Kids.

 

Portrait 2
Create King Tut's portrait out of lego- use a large base board and flat pieces to create a mosaic.

 3.Ankh. Make an ankh- symbol of good luck out of air dry modeling clay, paint with acrylic paint when dry. 

4. Cartouche. Create a cartouche (nameplate in Ancient Egypt) out of air dry clay or Sculpey, use a nail to scratch out child's name in hieroglyphs (Egypt Hieroglyphic Name Translator), or stamps can be made out of potatoes. Let dry. Paint with acrylic paint and decorate with golden sharpie.

Other crafts:

Ancient Egyptian Crowns Coloring Pages

Papyrus Project

Papyrus using paper bags

Ancient Egypt themed Birthday Party- lots of crafts ideas

Internet links:

The Virtual Egyptian Museum

Ancient Egyptian Diary

Discovery Education Free Lesson Plan on Ancient Times

Tombs of Ancient Egypt- video

Egypt Facts and Pictures

Brainteaser-Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt for Kids

The British Museum Page on Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt Games and Stories

The Children's university of Manchester- Ancient Egypt

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.