Posts Tagged ‘early history’

Hieroglyphs

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

hieroglyphsMy children have enjoyed drawing hieroglyphs and rubber stamping them. (If you want to see the hieroglyph rubber stamps, look at my YouTube video on Ancient Egypt.) My 10-year-old son said that he was a scribe, and he wrote a full page of hieroglyphs in pencil, telling a story. He rolled up the sheet of paper, came over to me, and said, “Where is my Ancient Egypt costume?” I told him the one I made was too small; that it was his brother Stephen’s now. Maybe next week or the week after I’ll make him another one. (Besides, I’m still figuring out how to spread the fabric glue faster, because for my conference workshop next March, I’ll be doing a workshop entitled “Using Simple Costumes and Props to Teach the Bible.” In that conference workshop, my opening act is to make a simple Bible costume in five minutes with no sewing. I’m researching the fastest way to make it.)

Anyway, my son wanted to be an Egyptian scribe because, he said, his work contained all the wisdom of Ancient Egypt.

For rubber stamping the hierpglyphs, we dipped the rubber stamp (with one hieroglyph on it) into some gold paint. Then we stamped it on black paper. I’ve never seen that done before. I just made it up because it looked cool. To make it easier, put a very shallow puddle in a wide jar lid. Then when you dip it, it won’t be completely immersed in gold paint. (Yellowish-gold paint is the best color for this project.)

Bryan wrote the following message in hieroglyphs (he made this up out of his imagination): “The black bird flying over a red sunset is a good omen. A bad omen is a viper sitting in the garden.”

Stephen wrote: “A good omen is a flower at sunrise. A bad omen is a vulture around a pyramid.” He just made that up, too, based on Bryan’s sentence structure.

My daughter just rubber stamped the entire hieroglyph alphabet, and Nathaniel wrote a simple sentence and signed his name, all in hieroglyphs.

Later when we watched a video about Egypt, the kids were actually reading the hieroglyphs on the walls of Egyptian tombs! They recognized the different sounds, anyways. I thought that was neat.

Map of Egypt

Saturday, September 11th, 2010

map-of-EgyptWhenever you study a country, you ought to color a map of it, no matter what age you are. It helps you to remember the shape of the country, the rivers, and whatever else is on the map, like the major cities. I love this particular map of Egypt because it has some cartoon-like cultural stuff on it. Kids love it, and they can see where the pyramids are located, where Abu Simbel is (I walked around there!), and where Upper and Lower Egypt are (in opposite locations than you would think).

We colored the Nile River blue first. Then we put green along the river, because I’ve been on the Nile River, and it’s green right next to the water, where there are palm trees. The rest of the land is sand dunes. So the children colored the rest of the land light brown or yellow to represent the sand. Having a strong grasp of how Egypt looked, the kids were ready to make Egypt cookies.

Cave Paintings: Art Project & Virtual Field Trip

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

cave-paintings

My children had a great time making cave paintings this week. We went on a virtual field trip to some caves in France. It felt like we were inside the caves with flashlights. Here is the link for the French caves we explored:

The children paid attention to what kinds of objects were painted on cave walls. Lots of cows and horses were pictured, along with camels and bison and people. On the back of a brown grocery bag (cut open), we sketched some figures in pencil. Then we used metallic paint left over from our outer space mural earlier this year. The pictures came out great!