Egypt

Another great unit! Ancient Egypt, continuing the grand olde tradition of Magic Treehouse with the Kindergarteners by reading Mummies in the Morning. It was a bit trickier finding preschool books but found some good ones about desert animals and, of course, triangles!

Moon sand creates an awesome medium for Egypt because you can really get nice pyramids with the molds! Add in a Toob and everything looks great. In that first picture you can see a large cardboard pyramid. That sucker mathed me out for a couple days, it took me the whole of Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III to design, trace, cut, and assemble it. Ultimately worth it, it became something concrete for the children to remember, and the only 3D shape they never need coaching on is the pyramid! Speaking of pyramid that was one of our special words this unit! (Pyramid, Egypt, Hieroglyphics, Mummy, and Sarcophagus) Hieroglyphics were a big hit with the kids and they'll occasionally drop that term in conversation. I played this CD the whole unit (beware that last song, funny, but maybe not to be played as part of a serious study), and I totally give credit to the song about hieroglyphics being the reason, I still find myself humming it!

We also colored in some sarcophagi as our first marker practice of the year. (I don't break out the markers for art very often because I think work done in low grade read: washable, looks awful.)

We did some other cool projects that I haven't got any pictures for, including making a cartouche with our names for the lockers and making a landscape. The landscapes looked really cool and I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get any pictures... they had crayon ground yellow, orange, and brown, and a watercolor sky, there were some nighttime skies but most of them were sunsets. Later we cut triangles out of sandpaper and put them on to be the pyramids. My favorite activity was our culminating event... painting the pyramid! The catch? They had to invent or copy hieroglyphics, instead of painting it a solid color. Some examples:

Water

Boy (Green)

Bug (Orange)

The alphabet.

Finito!