Exploring Ancient Egypt Class Summary 9/16/13

Welcome Explorers!

It was a pleasure welcoming all our six to eight year old students in class today as we kick off our semester of Egyptian Exploration!

Our morning class began with an introduction to History, as we asked the question:  How do we come to know things about the past?

I read aloud from the Introductory Chapter of The Story of the World, Volume 1 which discussed what it means to "do history".  Students shared some fun facts about their own personal histories from stories they know of their birth and infancy, and we learned about the two basic methods for uncovering information about the past:

• Stories and Writings
• Artifacts

Students took turns searching for "artifacts" I had hidden in sand, as we discussed the important work of archeologists in uncovering information from the past.  Among the treasures the students unearthed were a scarab, an amulet, the sphinx, hieroglyphs, the pyramids, a sarcophagus, a cat statue, and various Egyptian gods and goddess statues.  This provided a thought-provoking introduction to subjects we will be exploring throughout the semester.  Naturally, just the simple act of sifting through the sand was a real crowd pleaser!

We began to build our Word Wall, which we will continue to expand on with new vocabulary as the semester progresses.  Today's words were:  History, Archeologist, Artifact, Continent, Egypt.  We will develop both language and writing skills as students learn the definitions of new words and practice writing and spelling them each week.

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Students began identifying several of the continents on both the globe and the wall map.  Once they found Africa, we narrowed in on the location of Egypt and students had an opportunity to color and label their own maps of Africa.

In the next few weeks we will continue working with maps to identify the location of the Nile River and other significant geographic landmarks of ancient Egypt.

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When Sally joined our early elementary class to lead the instruction in the afternoon, they were happy to tell her about their morning's work. They showed her Egypt on the map, and proudly told her that it was on the continent of Africa. Then we found and named the other continents. Some of these children already knew about the first continent Pangaea. After talking about Pangaea we took a look at the insides of our planet, and drew our own cut outs of the earth. Children who are comfortable writing labeled the parts of the earth.

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Our class has a wide range of abilities and experiences with reading, writing, and math, and this is absolutely age appropriate. To assess each child's grasp of number and quantity I started by reading Math Fables. As we worked through the stories we made the numbers with cuisenaire rods, concluding by finding all of the ways to make 10. As the semester unfolds, children will be working in small groups in math according to their individual needs.

This is a delightful and engaged group of children and we are looking forward to working together!

See you all next week!

Jayne & Sally