Ancient Egypt activities for children

There are lots and lots of teaching resources for Ancient Egypt, so I didn't really have to come up with many activities on my own. One thing that was a big hit was ordering this Egyptian game, Senet. I think scholars admit that we don't really know for sure how it was played in ancient times, but they have come up with rules for it and my kids really liked it. They like board games anyway, but this was one even the kindergartner could play! It's just a two-player game (as you might not be able to tell from the picture) but it's quite fun! 

One book suggested making dried apples and talking about how much of food preservation involved salting or drying back in those times, especially in hot dry Egypt! You just cut apple slices and put them in a 200-degree oven until they look dry and leathery. Or you can use a fruit dryer. My children have done lots of fruit drying with their grandma, so this wasn't new to them, but it was kind of fun anyway. It relates sort of to mummification also! :)

But to really talk about mummification, we did the ol' Apple Mummies activity. I feel you can't swing a cat on the internet without smacking a page about the Apple Mummies activity, so I won't recap it much here, except to say that it's not the very yuckiest option you can do, so that's good. You use salt to approximate the natron Ancient Egyptians used for their mummies. Here's an alternate version of this project.

Another fun thing to try is making Egyptian reed boats. We just picked some hollow-ish reeds from a stream nearby and held them together with twist ties while they dried. They do, indeed, float! And the children liked floating little toy soldiers on them in the bath.

A lot of pyramid-building play went on during this unit, which was fun to watch!

Insect Encounters

During this unit we started noticing bugs everywhere, as you always do when you're studying something. It was fun to watch the children catching little bugs and making friends with them---even more than usual. :) We seemed to find an unusual amount of grasshoppers. Sebby was so pleased when this one hopped onto his shoulder!

I bought a few crickets at the pet store for us to observe. They didn't chirp much but it was still fun to watch them hopping around. When we were done, we let them go (I hope they were grateful not to be fed to a tarantula or something!).

Here is Junie's bee! She brought it inside to show me and I couldn't believe it wasn't stinging her! She said, "He wouldn't sting me; he LOVES me!" I guess he did. Although the little girls did get stung by bees at other times during this unit. (And it didn't dampen their enthusiasm one bit!) Luckily none of us are allergic, so it's no big deal. (We mostly feel bad for the poor BEES!) You dab some bleach on the sting and it takes the pain right out. Do you know that trick? I still remember my mom doing it to me when I was young and the pain going away like magic. It still works. I wonder why? I've never heard about it it anywhere else.

Praying mantis! We love these.

Children all congregated around some interesting insect or other.

Building a Paper Airport

We learned all about airports, and then decided to build one of our own using what we'd learned! We got a lot of information about Air Traffic Control from this packet, and then we learned some cool stuff about runway lighting and what it means from this page. And this page had more information on what the runway symbols, etc. mean. Really fascinating.

We really tried to get everything accurate, and it was so fun to find things around the house to stand in for various parts of the airport! And it was great to have a place for all the homemade model planes to go. The only trouble was that we built this right next to our front door, so it was in the way of everything for several days, and there was lots of muttering and "ouch!"-ing from everyone who walked by and stepped on a stray "runway light"!

Abe mostly made this check-in area. There are different lanes for drop-off and pick-up, as well as shuttle buses, to keep everything running smoothly. Each airline has a separate check-in desk.

Daisy made the main airport control tower, as well as the maintenance hangar and one of the radar towers (the red curly thing on the left of the picture).

She also made a nice long-term parking lot.

Malachi made the security area with these walk-through metal detectors, and conveyor belts to carry the luggage through the X-ray machine.

Seb's masterpieces were the runways and taxiways, all appropriately labeled and lit with accurate lighting systems (as learned above), of course!

His tiny runway approach lights looked just like the real ones we saw on our trip to the airport!

It was really a wonderful airport. Everyone had so much fun playing with it!

Printer Robot

Some of our friends gave Seb an old printer to take apart. The printer motor still worked, so he hooked it up to a battery and made this funny little spinning "robot." :) 

Bear Sleepover

I can't even tell you how many school teachers' blogs I read, while I was looking around for Bear Unit ideas, that described a "bear sleepover" where the students brought in their stuffed bears and then discovered them up to all kinds of trouble in the classroom the next day. I thought the kindergartner and preschooler among us would particularly appreciate such a thing, so accordingly, the children gathered all their bears in the living room one night for a sleepover. There are many, many bears in this house.

Although not all of them are, strictly speaking, bears.

Anyway, there was much surprise and delight when the girls discovered what mischief the bears were up to the next morning! They laughed and laughed. It was so fun to watch them notice each new thing.

Well worth the slight effort, really. Those rascally bears! :)

Bear Den/Cave (Geodesic Dome)

During our Architecture Unit, we built a Geodesic Dome out of newspaper, and it was one of our favorite activities. It was also one of those activities where you get better at it as you go along, and by the time it was all built we were convinced we could make it even stronger and nicer if we just started over. So we vowed to do the activity again sometime, and my mom saved newspapers for us.

This Bear Unit seemed like a great opportunity to finally revisit the geodesic dome, since we could cover it with blankets and use it as a bear den!

Original instructions for the dome are here. This time we used three sheets of newspaper for each strut (as opposed to two last time), which seemed to make them a lot sturdier. We also used pencils or chopsticks to roll the tubes around (pulling the pencils out once the tubes were rolled) and keep them nice and thin. And we connected our joints with a flatter tape formation, as above. The joints are really the trickiest part, since they tend to collapse at stress points. Last time we tried staples to make them stronger, but that didn't work too well. We still had a few that seemed weak, but the wide, flat tape-joint seemed to work better.

The bears loved their cozy home!

After we covered it with sheets and blankets to make it nice and snug, we talked about hibernation and bear cubs inside this "den," and spent lots of time just cuddling and reading Bear books and playing Bear. Very fun!

Backyard Play

One of my favorite things about this unit was that the children were always putting on plays in their free time. They liked staging swordfight scenes, of course, but after we talked about soliloquies (here are some resources we used, in addition to reading the texts of some of the famous Shakespeare soliloquies) they started incorporating many existential questions about life into their plays as well. I loved it. Seb and Malachi spent a good hour planning and rehearsing this play in the backyard, which featured much walking about, gesturing, and talking about "what shall I do next? He seems sincere, but can I trust him? Can I trust myself? Ah, if only the way were clear!" It was all very philosophical. :)

Oh, there were moments of action too, of course. (They were pleased to have their newspaper swords.)

But there was also much internal conflict. 

And, as it contained something for every taste, the play was a smashing success!

Train Play

As you can imagine (and as if they needed any further encouragement), the children did a lot of playing centered around trains during this unit. It was fun to see what they came up with in their free time!

(This was a failed attempt at making a high-speed train---Seb thought he could reduce the friction between the train car and the ground by getting everything wet. The cardboard didn't hold up to that very well.) :)