I’m not a history buff so teaching my kids history this year was a little challenging but we have all learned a lot. It is amazing what a great book can do for perking interesting, I should have known this of course, being a huge book lover! While history isn’t my thing, creativity is, and it also is engaging for kids and my kids are loving how hands on they are getting while learning and revisiting their book and these hieroglyphs are just one example of that.
Getting Hands on with History – Hieroglyphs
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We have a really great book for our history lessons this year, The Usborne Book of World History, it came with our Reading with History Level 1 curriculum. This books is full of hands on learning activities and crafts to do with your kids as you’re learning about different periods and cultures in history. Creating stories using the early invention of writing, hieroglyphs, is one of the activities that we turned into our own and was one of our favorites. (It was not done exactly this way in the book.)
We used modeling clay from the dollar store, we just lucked out that they had it in stock when I was looking but Walmart and Amazon are usually my go to place to get it. We also used some playdough toys like the rolling pins and knives.
Each of my kids got a good sized chuck of clay rolled it flat and then proceed to “write” a story on their clay using hieroglyphs. They used a combination of those that were shown in the book and those they created on their own.
I want to point out that my kids did theirs on placemats because it made clean up easier and I didn’t have to worry about it sticking to my dining room table, which is where we do school. I’m planning on doing this again this summer, outside where the clay will dry faster, and encourage new, nature inspired stories.
What kind of story do you think that your kids would write using hieroglyphs?
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good way to add a hands-on element to studying Egypt, well done