Summer SAVY 2019: Session 3, Day 1 – Beyond the Pyramids (Rising 1st/2nd)
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. What is papyrus? Did all Egyptians travel by barge like the Pharoah? How is linen made and from what natural resource?
Your child has brought a good amount of prior knowledge, 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 timeline. Additionally, we explored both world and regional maps in order to visualize the land and waters. We learned 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 12 years, in his aquarium system. Through group discussions and individual drawings, students identified boundaries, elements, inputs, and outputs of this system. We will then be generalizing these concepts to other systems such as ancient Egyptian agriculture, language, and government/social systems. What other systems can you name? How do we know when a system is functional or dysfunctional? How can systems be interdependent?
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 in our class later this week!
Mrs. Byrd
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