Ancient Egypt Activities

Studying Ancient Egypt is so fun! I love it. We repeated some of our favorite activities from our Ancient Egypt Unit several years ago (2017, wow!) and did a few new ones as well. Making sugar cube pyramids is actually not something we've done before, so it was fun to try that. We built some with the dry sugar cubes, and we also tried sticking them together with "mortar" (honey) to make them sturdier.

It's interesting to see firsthand how those perfect pyramid proportions are NOT inevitable. They take a lot of planning!

We didn't make papyrus this time (though we've tried that before), but we watched this really great video about how it's made. 

How to make papyrus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCR8n7qS43w

I'm not sure if all of Goldie's hieroglyphs are 100% authentic… :)

Cartouches! So fun.

Daisy and Junie still remembered making Pharaoh death masks from last time, and were excited to do it again, this time all by themselves!

Ziggy looked quite scary in his. It's the eyeless eyes, I think.

Daisy was the only one who remembered to make her stripes go out like sun-rays, and she made a false beard for hers, too. It turned out great!

It looked especially good when she dressed up like a Pharaoh in her skin-colored leotard, holding the crook and flail of the Ancient Pharaohs!

We didn't have a celebration for the Ancient Egypt section of this unit, and more's the pity. I have such great memories of our last one. Hopefully this will not be the last time we study Ancient Egypt!

Pyramids

We spent our first day of this unit talking about pyramids and triangles. Of course, we covered the Great Pyramids in Egypt, but we also talked about modifications of that idea----the ziggurats, pyramids of the Inca and Maya, etc. I had to go somewhere in the middle of the day, so I told the boys to figure out how to make three-dimensional pyramids from paper while I was gone. They learned a lot from figuring that out all on their own---for example, that a polygonal base determines the number of triangular sides of the pyramid. They also learned how different sizes of triangles produced different pyramid heights (and/or gaps between sides, if they were irregular).

When I got back, we printed out a bunch of templates and made a whole city of pyramids. We found the templates at this great site---it has pdf's of all types of pyramids for you to fold. You can choose how many sides you want your pyramid to have. There are also all sorts of other polyhedra to print and make. Really fun.

We absolutely devoured David Macaulay books during this unit---he's one of our favorites. Pyramid, of course, was for this day.

Somebody made a step pyramid with blocks. There's a tomb under it (see the circular entrance near the bottom).