Submitted by Rachel Beard-Curran, Eagle Room Teacher at Brentwood Early Childhood Center

Our kids chose to study Egypt.  What’s not to love? Mummies. Pyramids. Hieroglyphics. All these topics completely fascinated our preschoolers. Rather than just skim over the tops of these, we like to really dive in. We want the kids to understand, as best they can, what life was like in Ancient Egypt.

PYRAMIDS:
Our students experimented for days, building pyramids out of nearly every material they could find. They quickly noticed the mathematical patterns involved. They began adding details to their pyramids that reflected the resources they were using.  The Great Sphinx and tombs were soon included.

This particular pyramid fell down about 56 times over three days.  The whole class cheered when they finally got it to stand. Note for a minute the amount of persistence and focus that took.  This is everything we want from our kids. Patience. Persistence. Grit.

We learned that each stone in the pyramid weighed about 2.5 tons.  Each stone was carved and moved into place by hand, all before the invention of the wheel.  Our students experimented with friction, weight, and distribution to move a 100 pound box.

“We need this to be a little slippery to move it easier.”

“We need lots more people to help pull this.”

One day in the garden, the kids remembered that Egyptians perfected a method for making bricks to build their homes.  They had a rough recipe of mud, sand, and grasses. Several kids involved themselves in the process of digging and mixing “the perfect mud.” They formed bricks and then brought them inside to dry in the sun.  It was a long, messy affair.

They were elated with the results.

The real learning, however, came in failure.  One student felt so strongly about his brick recipe.
“I have wet sand and mulch.  The wet sand sticks so good. The mulch is going to make it super strong.”

In its wet form, it looked the strongest.  When it dried, however, it crumbled to nothing.

“I think you need mud to make this all stick together.  And the mulch… that’s just too chunky.”

MUMMIES:

In our learning about mummies, we learned about symbols.  The scarab beetle was considered lucky in ancient Egypt.
We learned that the Egyptians believed a god pushed the sun across the sky each day and buried it underground at night, much like the African dung beetle.  Videos of the beetle in action were intriguing and disgusting all at once. The kids quickly moved past the gross to understand the metaphor.

 

Mummies also led us to conversations about life and death.  Actually, this has been a conversation that has been going all year long.  We let them wrestle around with what they know and probe them with questions that challenge them to think deeper. Quotes by kids unpacking their understanding:

This is how we think kids learn best.  Biology, ecology, physics…. they shouldn’t be compartmentalized.  They are a part of everything. Kids are natural scientists, ready to explore it all and to dig right in.  When given the opportunities, they are capable of some pretty incredible thinking.