All things Egypt!

The students have been studying ancient Egypt since the second week of school. We have learned about the Nile River, how they structured their society, some famous Pharaohs, the pyramids, writing and of course, mummies (though, we really just scratched the surface on that one ... more to come on that topic for them later).

To get the kids a little more revved up about ancient Egypt, we took a look at the Sphinx that sits just outside the pyramids at Giza and carefully protects them. Using this as our inspiration, the kids designed their own Sphinxes, which were half animal, half them. We took pictures of them making some - how shall we say this - rather odd faces for their sphinx. Some went with determined, others went out to scare you and some just make you wonder.

We also decided to dive into what it was like for scribes back in ancient Egypt, whose job was to keep records for the Pharaoh. These men were honored in society, falling just under the soldiers, government officials and Pharaoh on the social pyramid. They went to schools for years to learn how to write properly and were beaten if they got out of hand at school. We had a discussion about how common writing is today but how rare it was then. After that, we had the students just try to write their own names in Hieroglyphics. It took some of them around 10-15 minutes just to get their names written in Hieroglyphics correctly. Quite a difference.

We'll be finishing Egypt up shortly. The students all received the study guides already and will be working on making review board games in the upcoming days to help them study as well. After we play all of those games, we'll take the test, which will be on Wednesday of next week.