Ancient Egypt

The girls haven't really participated in history with us much so I decided to do a quick study of Ancient History before we move on into the Middle Ages. We started with learning about what history and archaeology are and then talking about nomads and how they started becoming farmers. After that, we did a short unit study on ancient Egypt. I used Story of the World (SOTW) to help me divide up the topics.

Day 1
Read SOTW Ch. 2: Egyptians Lived on the Nile
Books: The Nile River, Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile
Activities: locate Egypt and Nile River on map; look here for info on life on the Nile
Lapbooks: where is Egypt, the Nile River, pharaoh

Day 2
Read SOTW Ch. 3: Hieroglyphs
Books: Hieroglyphs, The Day of Ahmed's Secret, Solve the Mystery of Ancient Egypt, started Mummies in the Morning
Lapbook: name in hieroglyphs- looked at this website and then kids drew their name

Top to bottom: Caleigh, Molly, Colin

Day 3
Read SOTW Ch. 4: Old Kingdom of Egypt (Making Mummies section)
Books: Mummies Made in Egypt, Eyewitness Books-Mummy, 100 Things You Should Know About Mummies
Lapbook: making mummies, Book of the Dead
Activities: decorate sarcophagus, take turns going through the process of making a mummy here, look through this, make apple mummies

Sarcophagus pictures

Day 4
Continue reading SOTW Ch. 4: Egyptian Pyramids section
Books: Who Built the Pyramids, Pyramid
Lapbooks: Sphinx, what would I find inside an Egyptian tomb
Activities: word search, play Seega

Day 5
Read SOTW Ch. 12: Middle Kingdom of Egypt and Ch. 13: New Kingdom of Egypt
Books: Egypt: in Spectacular Cross-Section, Adventures in Ancient Egypt, Who was King Tut? (Colin only)
Look at Tut websites here, here, and here
Activities: crossword puzzle, King Tut coloring page, online game

Colin                       Molly                    Caleigh

Day 6
Play Mehen
Lesson 21 from Artistic Pursuits book 1: Art in pyramids

Crawl through the passageway

Climb steps

Arrive in hallway of the pyramid

Our book said the drawings on the wall were of everyday life. They also drew things that they believed would help the person in the afterlife. They believed the drawings would come to life. Here are the kids' drawings.

Not really sure what's going on in Molly's picture. She said she was drawing a pyramid and it didn't look right so she did this.

Caleigh has a pyramid, mummy, flower, sun, tree, & a servant.

Colin drew a pharaoh and a TV with a Wii. He wanted to make sure he'd have the Wii in case the drawings really did come to life.

In the SOTW activity guide, they have directions for making a mummy out of a chicken. I'm just not brave enough for that. I have enough trouble touching chicken to make dinner. So we used an apple instead. I sliced the apple. We put a piece in two plastic cups. We added 1/3 cup salt and 1/3 cup baking soda to one cup making sure the apple slice was covered. Then both cups were put into our pantry. This is what we found when we checked them a week later.

The mummified apple

The uncovered apple

The kids didn't think either apple piece looked that great. We compared the two noticing that the uncovered one had mold on it and was rotting while the mummified was didn't. The mummified was shrunken and dried out and the kids could easily tell it weighed less than the other.

Free Lapbook Resources:

Ancient Egypt unit study and lapbook from Homeschool Share

 Architect of Ancient Egypt Lapbook  from Handle on the Arts

Another Ancient Egypt lapbook

Notebook pages (all of these are from HSS except the picture in the bottom right corner; it was something you could print after playing the online game I posted above):

We've had lots of pyramid building going on around here. Here's one of Colin's: