I was very excited to teach the children about hieroglyphs, especially because it meant lots of lovely hands on activities.  We started off with a couple of fiction books, just to whet their appetites:

I then did some read aloud and we discussed the type of activities we wanted to do:

I had traveled around Egypt as a teenager and picked up all sorts of goodies we could use – bookmarks, papyrus paper and the like.  We turned these into note pages, describing what hieroglyphs were:

I had a lovely set of hieroglyph stamps which I let them play about with for a while on the understanding they had to read the booklet that came with it!

I had them write out the Egyptian alphabet on a note page and we stuck on some instructions how to make our own papyrus.  Although I had some proper papyrus, we all thought this sounded too fun to pass up:

And finally I asked them to make a cartouche of their name on the real papyrus, using the stamps:

We learnt about Champollion and cracking the code reading these two books:

I read them out loud, and the children read the second many times.  I think this book is one of the best historical picture books ever written and I highly recommend it!!  It is a true story book on Champollion’s life and I seriously can’t say enough good about it!  After ensuring the children fully understood the story, we did a key word outline together covering his life and I asked the children to write a three paragraph essay about him.  I gave as much or as little help as needed for each child:

We were so enjoying our time with the Ancient Egyptians!