Year 3 explore Ancient Egypt

Year 3 enjoyed a fantastic introduction to their upcoming history topic on Ancient Egypt.  They were taken back nearly 5000 years and experienced lives as Ancient Egyptians. They learnt about Egypt’s location and why, due to the extremely dry conditions and arid land, the River Nile was so important to everyday life, whether it was used for travel and transport, providing water for irrigating their crops, washing their clothes or for drinking.

The children were enthralled by the in-depth knowledge of the History Man, Mr Cadle.  They learnt about the Rosetta Stone and how it came to be that we were able to understand Ancient Egyptian writing, or ‘hieroglyphics’.  We were all fascinated to know that ‘hieroglyphics’ comes from the Ancient Greek word hieroglifikos, ‘hiero’ meaning sacred, or holy and ‘glyph’ meaning carving. So ‘hieroglyph’ means sacred carving.

Pupils also got to study life as an Egyptian child, examining the sort of toys and games they might have enjoyed.  These included games similar to Snakes and Ladders, Jacks, draughts and noughts and crosses.  Other toys included wooden crocodiles and rag dolls, made from the leftover rags used for clothing.  The children were very excited to play some of the games and see who they could beat!

The workshop provided a great opportunity for our pupils to immerse themselves in their new topic. They spent time looking at images of the land, desert and pyramids of Ancient Egypt. The children also had fun making clay scarab beetles, these were charms that the Ancient Egyptians would have taken to the afterlife with them,

Highlights from the session included the children getting dressed up as Ancient Egyptians and wearing crowns and wigs. Pupils were shown how to put on and tie the clothing the Ancient Egyptians would have worn. A further highlight for the children was a demonstration of how a mummy would have been wrapped, with finger being individually wrapped and tided very carefully.