Educating Risa

For a couple weeks now the boys have been expressing an interest in Ancient Egypt, our first foray into people history, rather than that of dinosaurs and animals. Yay! Admittedly, it was Daegan who first brought up the topic, after Jim mentioned a show about dinosaur finds in Egypt, and got the companion book for Daegan out of the library (Canada) (US):

So today I gathered up some materials we had around the house and did a very spur of the moment “unit study” on Ancient Egypt. We had found a couple promising books at the library yesterday; the Ms. Frizzle title proved to be a very useful introduction for my science- and Magic-School-Bus-loving boys:

Daegan recalled that one of his magazines had a whole issue about Ancient Egypt. (I highly recommend this magazine for kids anywhere. It is ad-free, and covers a wide variety of science topics. The publisher is Canadian, but the content is not. I thank my aunt for getting Daegan a subscription years ago, as it has built upon his love of bugs and dinos to introduce a wide variety of subjects.)

We built a pyramid of sugar cubes, talking about kings and pharoahs, square numbers, and burial rituals along the way:

We wrote our names in hieroglyphics:

 

 

We began an experiment to mummify an apple, the details of which can be found here. We did a simplified version:

We cracked some funny (or should I say punny) Egyptian-themed codes:

We read about the Great Pyramid (the boys are very into large numbers and measurement right now):

We moved “heavy blocks” (really, heavy books stacked on top of one another) as they would have when building the pyramid, and discussed how the ancient Egyptians might have made their work easier:

We got out some pencil crayon “logs” and used them to create rollers under the blocks, making the work much easier:

Tomorrow we will continue the Egypt theme by using squares to demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem (which the ancient Egyptians used to reallocate farmland after the Nile flooded each year). And Gareth wants to make date squares, his favourite dessert / snack. After all, as he pointed out to me while we were reading, dates did grow in Ancient Egypt.

If you have other favourite Ancient Egypt activities or resources, please leave me a comment. Thanks!