E is for Egypt: Kindergarten Activities to explore Ancient Egypt

My kindergartner loves studying history--it is one subject he can never get enough of. We have been using The Story of the World Vol. 1 (Ancient Times) as our core history "text" for this year, and we have been supplementing that with many other picture books and activities. Of all that we have studied so far, Ancient Egypt is my son's favorite--treasure, pyramids, the Nile River, and more all fascinate him. This would also be a fun unit study for kids of all ages, too. You could easily fit it in to your preschool or elementary school Halloween-themed activities because of course we have the Egyptian mummies as well!

Here are a few of our favorite books and activities we have done as part of our study of Ancient Egypt. My children, ages 5, 4, and 2 1/2 have loved all of these activities.

Books

It is easy to do a search in your local library for books about Ancient Egypt and come up with dozens of fiction and non-fiction books for kids. Among the many we read, the following three books were some of my kids' favorites.

Ms. Frizzle's Adventures: Ancient Egypt 
We love the Magic School Bus books. This book is a little different because it is summer vacation and so we don't have any of the students in school, but still Ms. Frizzle manages to take her fellow tourists on quite an adventure back in time to Ancient Egypt.

National Geographic Kids Everything Ancient Egypt: Dig Into a Treasure Trove of Facts, Photos, and Fun 
This was my kids' favorite non-fiction book about Ancient Egypt. It had short, interesting page spreads about different aspects of Ancient Egypt from pyramids to mummies to games. The photographs were big and eye catching and the facts were written in a way that the kids could understand and enjoy.

Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile 
My kids adore the funny Bill and Pete books. This is the second book about Bill and Pete and it features a Nile crocodile and his "toothbrush" (a bird named Pete) on a field trip down the Nile. They learn about Egyptian history and also save the day.

Activities/Crafts

We checked out the book Ancient Egyptians and Their Neighbors: An Activity Guide from our local library and it was full of great craft projects that went hand-in-hand with real artifacts found in Ancient Egypt. We made a cardboard Egyptian boat (from an old paper towel roll) and a model Egyptian garden--two crafts that were modeled after actual items found in Egyptian tombs. We also made our own Egyptian kilt costume (white fabric would have been more appropriate, but the only scrap fabric I had on hand at the time was red, and my son was okay with that). All of the instructions for these projects can be found in the above book.

My son also had to make Lego Pyramids and create his own pretend Nile River to sail his toy boats down. He even made the pyramids hollow underneath so he could store "treasures" inside.

Another hands-on activity he did was creating his own cartouche. We used a book about Egyptian hieroglyphs as a guide for him to write his name or you can find hieroglyph alphabets on websites such as this one). We also incorporated a lot of pretend play into our study. My kids loved forts, so they created their own tomb out of chairs and blankets and pretended to be workers, mummies, and more.

Virtual Museum Tours

We don't currently have any museums nearby with exhibits about Ancient Egypt, so we went on a virtual museum tour online. This website has images of many of the treasures found in King Tut's tomb. You can also find a vast collection of images on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website about their Egyptian collection. If we lived close enough to a museum that had an Ancient Egyptian exhibit, of course we would have loved to visit in person. But it was still very fun to look at images of artifacts online and in books.

-->