Summer SAVY 2017, Session 6/Day 1- Beyond the Pyramids (Rising 1st)

Posted by morganr1 on Monday, July 24, 2017 in SAVY.

Dear SAVY Parents,

Wow – what a great day we had in Ancient Egypt today! I am so grateful for the opportunity to work with your child this week, and I think they are pretty excited as well! Right off the bat we explored the culture of ancient Egypt by hearing the story of Rhodopis – the Cinderella of ancient Egypt. The children and I used a Venn diagram to analyze similarities and differences in the elements of this story and the traditional tale in order to learn more about ancient Egyptian culture. We learned that the Nile River, and the unique geography of the area, have certainly been instrumental. We will build on this information tomorrow as we learn about the rhythms of the Nile and it’s influence over the agricultural and farming system of the region.

Each child has brought some prior knowledge to the class already, however because ancient Egypt is such an unfamiliar time and place to young children, we explored some activities that got us talking about historical events and the evidence that we knew of to inform us of their place in history on a time line. Talking about events 5000 years ago on a far continent can be a bit abstract, so we had to put that into context of what we do know! Additionally, we explored world and regional maps in order to visual the land and waters. We leaned how important it is to share and challenge each others knowledge in order to increase our accuracy and make our collective knowledge more useful.

Finally, we got down to some really critical work of learning about systems which is a foundation for the rest of the week. Your child observed Davy, my aquatic frog teaching partner for the past 10 years, in his aquarium system. Through group discussions and individual drawings, students identified boundaries, elements, inputs, and outputs of this system. We saved more discussion for tomorrow about the all important interactions and connections of this system, but we will then be generalizing these concepts to other systems such as ancient Egyptian agriculture, language, and government/social systems. We took a look at another text called, The Winged Cat, that we will finish up tomorrow form more information about the Egyptian culture of mythology.

Tonight you may want to talk to your child both about all they already know and all that they are eager to learn about ancient Egypt. I’m sure they are eager to talk about pyramids and mummies, and we’ll get there soon too!

Mrs. Byrd