History Day: Ancient Egyptians

My kiddos studied Ancient Egypt in our co-op a while back, so I didn’t feel a need to stretch this out beyond a one day review.  We read about the Ancient Egyptians in CHOW (A Childs History of the World) chapters 6 and 7, and in Usborne Book of World History pages 14-23 and 33-39. 

Questions asked by the kids: 

Why did the Egyptians spend so much time on death? 

Why are they almost naked?( a heads-up on the Usborne book - there is some nudity)

Why are the queens pyramids so much smaller than the Pharoahs?  (My daughter thought this was ridiculous.  My son thought it made perfect sense– ‘because the boys do all the work’-)

Why did they make up such strange gods? 

Did people die when the Nile flooded?   

They also thought it would be fun to make wine by stepping on the grapes and they thought it was wasteful to use such a huge pyramid on only one person.   It was a great discussion. 

Then we made some Egyptian Palace Bread for tonights dessert.  We used 8 slices of whole wheat bread, and about 1 1/2 cups of honey.  We put one slice of bread in a greased 8×8 baking pan, poured some honey on it, put another slice of bread on top, more honey etc until we used all the bread and honey.  We let it sit for 30 minutes to allow the honey to soak in to the bread.  Then we baked it at 300 degrees for 45 minutes.  We let it cool until suppertime, but I did pop it into the oven to warm before serving – I think it is supposed to be served cold, but warm sounded better.  It is also supposed to be served with heavy cream poured on top, but we didn’t have any so we used cool whip. It was pretty good–sticky, but good.  I forgot to take a picture, but here’s one from food.com

While our palace bread was soaking, we made a water clock.   The idea is suggested in the Usborne book.  Here’s how we did it: 

Take two disposable plastic cups.  Poke a small hole in the bottom of one of them –we used a tack.  Cut a larger hole (almost the entire bottom) out of the second one.  Tape them bottom to bottom and stand them up in a medium mixing bowl with the pin-hole cup on top.  Make a mark near the top of the cup with a permanent marker.  Then fill the cup with water up to the mark you made.  Time one minute and mark the water level.  Continue timing minutes and marking the water level.  Voila. 

 Now you can time activities using your water clock. My kids used it to figure out how long it took to tidy up the living room (I wonder who suggested that…).  I was surprised at how long my kids stayed with this.  They made predictions at the start for how many minutes worth of water the cup held.  One guessed 5 and one guessed 10.  We were all surprised to find the answer was 13 (that’s when we stopped marking minutes because the lines were too close together.)  The kids were also surprised to find that the water slowed down as the water level dropped.    They made guesses as to why.  “The air gets heavier on the cup as the water goes down”  and “because the bowl underneath is filling up”.  I gave them a clue;  I filled two identical cups with water – one with just a small amount and one almost to the top.  I had them hold them and tell me what the difference was.  They figured it out and then we watched looked at this website demonstration of water pressure and flow rate.  I love those moments where you plan on teaching one thing, but the learning takes over and overflows your lesson plan.  LOVE IT!  In fact, those are the moments that keep me going.

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