Spring Saturday SAVY, Week 1, Beyond the Pyramids (K)
Saturday morning, we started with some activities to help the students get to know one another. They shared facts they knew about ancient Egypt and things they wondered about it. They asked some really good questions! We will search for answers to these questions in our upcoming sessions. Our morning read-aloud was Egyptian Cinderella, the oldest recorded version of Cinderella. I taught students about three career fields related to the study of ancient Egypt: anthropology, archaeology, and Egyptology. For the purposes of this class, the students will be challenged to think like Egyptologists.
Students also learned about hieroglyphics. We looked at photographs of artifacts that have hieroglyphics and viewed a photograph of the Rosetta Stone. We connected the hieroglyphics on the stone to those on the artifacts. Students used a hieroglyphics decoder to find the hieroglyph that corresponds to each letter of their name and wrote it in their field notebook. Learning Centers were introduced today. Students will have the chance to visit each center with a small group at least once during our sessions. At these centers, students use their field notebooks to record information they learn from non-fiction texts, practice using hieroglyphs to tell a story, develop theories about how the pyramids were constructed, and investigate pyramids and other three-dimensional shapes.
Our afternoon read-aloud was Me on the Map by Joan Sweeny. We found our city, state, and country on a map and our country on a globe. Then, we found the location of Egypt and looked at a current map of Cairo and Giza. Students added a map of ancient Egypt to their field notebooks that will be used in coming lessons. Students talked about the location of the cities and recognized that most are near sources of water. Next week, our primary focus will be the Nile River. Students will learn about animals in the Nile, tools developed by ancient Egyptians to help with farming near the river, and how resources, like papyrus, led to other inventions. I look forward to another Saturday of having fun while learning with the junior Egyptologists!