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Friday, November 11, 2011

Write Like An Egyptian

When my son and I got to the sixth chapter of Mary Pope Osborne’s book Mummies in the Morning, a light bulb went off in my head.



The third book in the Magic Tree House series takes Jack and Annie back to ancient Egypt where a ghost-queen asks for their help translating some hieroglyphs.

With a big plastic tub of card-making stamps collecting dust in our basement, I seized an opportunity to put them to use. First I picked 26 small stamps, one for each letter of the alphabet and stamped a key.

Then I stamped a “hieroglyphic” message for my son. Just like in Pope’s book when the code led the two young children to the Book of the Dead, the message my son decoded would reveal a hidden treasure under his bed (an inexpensive toy concealed in a brown lunch sack). I also made a blank sheet so he could stamp his own “hieroglyphs” for his Dad to decode.

Before my son started to read and write like an Egyptian, though, we read the First Facts book Hieroglyphs by Kremena Spengler.

8 comments:

  1. That's awesome! I am pinning this for when we study about Egypt next year!! This is was fun! Thanks for linking up to TGIF!
    Beth =-)

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  2. Wish I was still teaching so I could use this...kids love codes.

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  3. Very cool! We have a great book on just this thing, but we haven't done it yet. (It doesn't really "fit" into our year of AMERICAN studies!) I'm itching to do it though because I think the kids would enjoy it.

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  4. What a fun idea! Was your son able to decode the message you made for him?

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  5. My daughter loves "secret messages" - in fact she created her own secret language already :) This is a fun way to teach writing without being very blunt about it.

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  6. Thank you for all these great ideas on your site, the african book and mask and the totem pole and I love ancient Egyptian culture: this stamping idea looks like fun. How old is your son? Thanks for joining in the year long link party at Today At Play. I will be featuring some over the next few weeks.

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  7. I always loved teaching about Egyptian art to 6th graders! Great project! Thank you for sharing this with us on The Sunday Showcase

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  8. I love the idea! I'm planning an archaeologist birthday party for my son and just may use this trick to put together some "clues" for our little treasure hunters to find. (This will be an Indiana Jones style hunt, if I can swing it.) Feel free to visit me at Cardboard Craftland at www.cardboardcrafter.blogspot.com

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