In history this half term, the children in Year 4 are learning all about the Ancient Egyptians!

We thought ahead and did a lot of learning last half term about the River Nile in our geography topic of rivers, so our first few lessons where we discovered how the Ancient Egyptians relied so heavily on the River Nile for their success was easy. We then recapped our existing knowledge of chronology and used a timeline to order some key events that took place during the 3’000 years the Egyptian Empire span, particularly how the Egyptian era began and ended. Following this, we have enjoyed spending lots of lessons diving into all sorts of aspects – the Egyptian Gods, some of the key Egyptian Pharaohs, the reason for a sarcophagus and of course, mummification. The children have made lots of practical resources to bring the topic to life, like the sarcophagus models, the River Nile 3D map project boxes and 3D pyramid fact-files. 

We have of course linked our Egyptian topic to other aspects of learning, like our English where we started our new class novel called ‘Secrets of a sun king’ and the focus book for our English lessons, the alternative traditional tale ‘Egyptian Cinderella’. The children have been busy studying this story and will soon be using this as an inspiration to apply their knowledge of the Egyptians to their own version of the twisted tale. The children will soon take part in a science experiment too linking to The Egyptians – we are going to mummify our own fruit and compare this with the decay of fruit that is not mummified side by side.