Exploring Ancient Egypt Class Summary 12/16/13

Sarcophagi

Students completed the outside of their sarcophagi in our morning class, adding the "egyptian eye" symbol and a door for their mummy's Ba to come and go. 

Some students chose to add hieroglyphic stamps as decoration.  

We then placed our mummies in their tombs, along with colored gems and other special items the children had brought from home.

Writing Games

During the second half of class we played a fun pre-writing game.  Students took turns pulling random items from a grab bag (candy cane, tinker toy, glue bottle, Christmas tree ornament, snowflake, etc) and were challenged to describe how to draw the item to their classmates, who were unable to see what they were holding.  Nothing could be disclosed about the functionality of the item; only an exact description of what the item looks like and how to draw it.

The students found this activity very fun and everyone was excited to get their turn to choose from the grab bag of mystery items and be in charge of describing what to draw!

Aside from being fun, this activity really flexes some important pre-writing skills. It requires careful listening and mental translation skills on the part of those drawing, and attention to detail and verbal expression on the part of the describer.  

Student drawers did an amazing job capturing the detail of each verbal description. Those in the position of "describer" discovered after the first few rounds, that using precise words and providing a thorough description is very important for successful communication of their ideas.

After a few turns (and some slightly askew drawings!), the drawers took initiative and began asking some clarifying questions - how long should the second line be? does the smaller circle touch the big circle or is it next to it? do I draw the lines spaced evenly apart? Very impressive!

You might enjoy playing this as a family at home.  It's not as easy as you think!

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Playing with Measurements

To think further about measurement we began our afternoon class by reading Is the blue whale the biggest thing there is?  This book encouraged us to think about size creatively. 

Next we made a list of ten things that we would each measure with our own cubit. Then we set to work, recording our measurements on a chart. When we were done we found that we had different measurements for some things, especially the length of the room. This led to some interesting observations about the importance of using the same unit of measure. 

We wonder whether the Ancient Egyptians had any problems using digits, palms, and cubits to measure things?

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