Study of Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt is one of the funnest things we've ever studied. We kicked of the unit with a trip to the King Tut exhibit in Idaho Falls. It was pretty neat, but for me personally it was a little bit of a let down knowing that they were just replicas. The rest of the family didn't know that going in, so they were VERY impressed :)

Once back home, we did a lot of reading. I honestly can't remember all the books Mason read from the library. He went over to the shelf and filled up his bag with anything that had to do with Egypt, including cookbooks! Sorry to all the rest of you who were studying Egypt at the same time :) Nate read The Cat of Bubastes and Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt and wrote reports on both. These were both free downloads that I put on his Kindle. I also had him present each report orally and we discussed them. We also used Usborne's Encyclopedia of The Ancient World. I love this book and the internet links it has in it. We also used the Old Testament, From Ancient Times:Creation to Assyria- Foundations of World History, and Homeschooling in the Woods: Great Empires.

 We watched several movies and YouTube videos about the whole country, the Great Pyramids, Sphinx, King Tut, Cleopatra, Ramesses, Akhenaten, Nefertiti,and the Nile River. The library has several good movies you can check out, but you rarely find them there so you have to reserve them. Netflix is also a good resource for documentaries.

The boys each have a history notebook and this is what they added to it (behind the unit on Mesopotamia that I never got posted *sigh*) 

Maps of Ancient Egypt (This is Mason's)

Timelines

Notebooking pages on: King Tut, The Great Pyramids, The Sphinx, Everyday life, Mummification, Pharaohs, Burial Traditions, and Biblical Prophets and Their Ties To Egypt.

We also joined some of our fave people, The Rodgers Family for a day learning about the geography, food, culture, etc. We ate Egyptian food, and each child did a little presentation about what they had learned about the country. Mason had to tell about Egyptian curses, and Nate was intrigued by cat worship, of course!

We also did several hands-on projects. We bought a papyrus making kit and made papyrus. It also came with several blank pieces and some with printed pictures already on them for the kids to paint.

We mummified a chicken- her name was Henrietta the Hen. This really grossed me out! She sat on our counter for 10 weeks. I was so paranoid that someone was going to get sick from doing this. When I say someone, I should just say me, because the boys didn't want to have anything to do with it after about week 1 :) It really wasn't that bad. She never really smelled and there wasn't any signs of decomposition even after sitting at room temp for all that time. She's now buried in our backyard and the boys have grandiose dreams of digging her up in a few years to see what she looks like. If you ever do this, be prepared to use lots of salt and Ziploc bags. I think we went through about 50 pounds, seriously!

We also made pyramids out of sugar cubes. We were all ready to paint them sand color until we found out that the original pyramids were white with a gold top. Kinda cool!

We spent a total of 7 weeks on this unit, but had a great time. Now we're off to study the Greeks! I'm really excited for this because we finally get to use our Heritage History CD's!