Adventurs as Annie in EGYPT

This was the last Magic Tree House Adventures session until the school year picks up again in the fall. I now feel that I have a small understanding of how a teacher feels on their last day of school. Going to miss those kids. We didn't have a crazy 50+ group like in the past few sessions. It was graduation weekend and being a university town, everything is affected by what's going on with the school. But we did have our tried and true core of 30 kids in attendance.

Off we went to the marvelous and mysterious Ancient Egypt...

Where Are We? Who Are They

Just like in the previous Magic Tree House Adventure sessions, our first activity is "Where Are We? Who Are They?", a slide show guessing game about the place and time period we're visiting for the day. We discussed the pyramids, famous pharaohs, the culture, the religion, mummies, tomb raiders, King Tut's discovery, and so much more. If you'd like the full presentation outline, please feel free to email me.

Mummy Wrap Race

I have to start by saying this did not go as expected.. but the kids still had fun nonetheless.

We divided the group into teams of 5. 1 person was the mummy, 2 were the mummifiers, and 2 were the excavators. We handed out 2 rolls of toilet paper to each mummifer. With the mummies and the mummifiers in each group standing and the excavators sitting we timed how long it took for the mummifiers to wrap their mummy. The toilet paper was thin and kept tearing, but the kids were laughing and didn't seem to care. The first group to finishing wrapping their mummy won. Then the excavators/tomb robbers were next. Their job was to see own fast they could unwrap the mummy carefully with as few toilet paper tears as possible.

Masks, Cartouches and Gold!

There were so many inspiring crafts for Ancient Egypt, that my partner"Jack" and I decided to make three, so we set up three rotating craft stations around the room in which the kids had 10 minutes at each station.

Cartouche Creations: There was a cartouche station where the kids learned about how to write their name in hieroglyphics. A co-worker found some awesome Egyptian stamps downstairs that we used as well.

Golden Jewels: We made necklaces of "lapis" and "gold" (my favorite of the crafts) were they strung together spray-painted rigatoni noddles on elastic string. I'm pretty sure all the kids ended up wearing their necklaces around.

Mummy Masks: The third station, was King Tut mask making. We pre-made and cut out the masks by tracing an image of King Tut's mask from a book and enlarging it onto 11x14 paper using our printer. After the copies were printed, we cut the eyes and shape out. All the kids had to do was color! The below image of King Tutankhamun's burial mask was left up on the projector from "Where Are We? Who Are They?", so the kids could use it as a guide. We also encouraged them to color their masks in whichever way inspired them. This idea was inspired by Imagine Explore Create.

The crafts were a big hit! They liked making them so much that they didn't want to stop when time was up. They finally let up on their crafting when I let their parents in to pick them up. As they were leaving, they were allowed to select as many Ancient Egypt books to check out from a table display in the back.

Among them were a couple books we used for the craft ideas:

The Ancient Egyptians by Fiona McDonald

The Egyptians by Ruth Thomson

Magic Tree House Adventure Journal #4:

As always, along with whatever the kids made that day and library books based on the theme, they also took home their Magic Tree House Adventure Journal. Here's an abbreviated peak at what's inside. Continuing the learning and the fun.

5 minutes after the kids were supposed to be released from the session they insisted on staying! We had to invite the parents and caregivers to come in the auditorium to collect their children.

I'll take that as as sign that they liked it.

Looking forward to continuing the adventures in the fall!

image sources: pyramids, king tut