Expedition Earth: Egypt

Sabahou el kheir! Welcome to our Expedition Earth week on Egypt!

Everyone’s been looking forward to this week because we were planning to do a mummy experiment. And I’m not sure about your kids, but when the word “mummy” comes up, everyone gets excited! But first…we had to stamp our passports so we could continue on our journey!

Here are some of the things we covered this week:

• Where Egypt is on the world map and located Cairo and the Nile River

• How to say “Hello” in Arabic

• Learned about the Egyptian flag and its meaning

• How to pray for the Egyptian people

• Read Usborne Encyclopedia of World Geography

• About children in Egypt

• Read: Living World Encyclopedia

• Geography from A-Z vocabulary

• Completed a Egypt lapbook activity

• Completed and classified animals of Egypt

• Learned about Mummies and King Tut

• Performed a Mummification Experiment on an apple

• Learned about the Great Pyramid of Giza, and made our own model of the pyramids

• Learned about the Suez Canal

• Played at http://www.kingtutone.com/kids/

• Visited an Egyptian mummy in real life!

We started off by reviewing all the countries we’ve learned so far, then worked on our mapping project. We discussed the Sahara desert, the Nile river and learned some cool facts about Egypt.

We had a lot of fun activities this week, but one simple idea that was a HUGE success, was the scarab stone craft we did from Global Art. The kids went outside and gathered some nice smooth oval shaped rocks, then we used colored sharpies to color them. I still find these things all over the house!

We learned about the Egyptian flag and colored our worksheet.

We completed our Egypt mini-lap book to add to the world lapbook once we’re all done.

We learned about 6 fun animals found in Egypt, here are our favorites…I’m not sure what’s up with the faces, but as we progress through our expedition, they seem to be getting crazier and crazier.

Since Egypt was our last country in Africa, we did a review of all the countries we learned and colored them in on our review map.

Of course a tour through Egypt wouldn’t be complete without learning about the Great Pyramid of Giza! We used FloraCraft Styrofoam Bricks to make ours. We learned that building a pyramid was harder than it seemed! I didn’t want to waste bricks by making full layers for each level, so we glued a couple layers then let it dry then glued a few more. This took forever, and our pyramid got a little deformed along the way! I don’t know how those Egyptians did it!

And probably one of our favorite parts of the week came on Apple Mummification Day! The kids did a great job weighing their apples, then measuring their mixtures. Everyone was excited to see results! I’ll post those in a separate instructional post.

At the end of our 7 days, we discovered that cup #3 with salt only was the best preserved apple in the bunch. Anything involving baking soda was horribly discolored and dehydrated!

It was totally cool that our local museum of nature and science happened to have a King Tut display open! We actually visited this a few weeks back just to make sure we didn’t miss it. The kids got to see a real mummy, and learn a little about the process. Kind of gross, but they loved it!

And that my friends wraps up our week on Egypt! Stay tuned as we head over to Australia next week!

Click here to learn more about my Expedition Earth World Geography curriculum!