Ancient Egypt

We have started a new unit on Ancient Egypt. It’s so hard to know what to look at in depth with this topic. The period covered by Ancient Egypt went on for three thousand years – that’s a lot to cover!

We have started with a look at the landscape and have made a collage of the Nile. We have picked out the green, fertile land along the banks of the river by using green tissue paper, whereas the rest of the desert is shades of orange.  As we talk about the different tombs and temples, towns and cities we will add them to our map.

The Nile

While the girls were cutting and sticking I read to them from Tony Robinson’s Weird World of Wonders – Egypt. They found the stories in this book very funny so our morning of crafts sped by with lots of giggles!

Hanging out on the timeline

We have strung up a timeline in our dining room/workroom and have marked on it the main periods of time in Ancient Egypt. We are finding that this helps to see how all the events are spaced out, and also to help visualise how the years BCE work – with the bigger numbers being at the left side of the timeline, meaning that 2000BCE is longer ago than 1,000BCE, which takes a bit of getting used to.

J made some notes, with help, on the different time periods while K wrote more extensively on the features of each. We talked about the many Gods and Goddesses worshipped back then and J designed and wrote about her own Goddess – modelled on her stuffed rabbit. We made some Top Trumps cards about the different deities and had loads of fun playing the game, which was a fantastic way to remember different facts without feeling like trying too hard! K wrote a couple of notebook pages about religion in Ancient Egypt, too.

Goddess designing

Ancient Egyptian Top Trumps

Both girls spent some time looking through the many library books we have borrowed on the period. They looked at Egyptian fashions, clothes and jewellery. Then we had a bit of fun making some pseudo-egyptian jewellery. Out of paper plates. You have to use your imagination!