This week’s theme:

Mysterious Places – Ancient Egypt

Fact of the day:

Pharaoh is the common title of the monarchs of ancient Egypt

Resources list:

Paper and pens; paper, tin foil, biros, soft book, glue; card, perfume, cotton wool; you tube; salt/sweet/sour/bitter food or drink to taste.

Activity 1:

If you were a Pharaoh and a leader of a country, what would your rules be? Write them down on a ‘Papyrus Scroll’ and read them to your subjects!

How strict can you look? Try pulling some strict and stern facial expressions. You could download and print this Pharaoh colouring page and add in what you think a strict and commanding Pharaoh’s facial expressions would be like

Activity 2:

Gold was a very important material and colour to Pharaohs. It was used a lot in their art, tombs, rituals and costumes.

The tomb of the Pharaoh, Tutankhamun, contained all the jewellery that he wore during his life. A huge number of artefacts were retrieved from his tomb and they show the fine craftsmanship during that period in Egypt. He was buried inside a sarcophagus which fitted inside three coffins. The innermost coffin was made of solid gold while the other two were covered with gold leaves. The head was covered with a beautiful mask of pure solid gold which had been beautifully beaten and polished, and the body was decorated with over one hundred and forty pieces of jewellery.

Try making some metallic art work of your own using tin foil: Draw a design onto paper; it could be an Egyptian pattern like The Eye of Horus, another pattern, or a drawing of your own. Then place a piece of foil under your paper (resting on a soft book, polystyrene plate or soft cardboard would work best), trace over your design with a ball point pen to transfer the image onto the foil. Flip the foil over so that the raised side is the front! (You could use coloured Sharpies or biros to colour the foil too, see here.)

Alternatively, you could cut out a cardboard shape and glue it to a piece of card, cover this with a glued sheet of foil and gently rub over the shape to create a relief of your shape. This again could be coloured with biros and patterns imprinted with the pressure of the pen. See here.

To get even fancier, you could use PVA glue which when dried creates a relief to cover with foil. See here for instructions.

Activity 3:

In Pharaoh’s tombs, paintings have shown strange cones on people’s heads, see here. Supposedly these cones were made of perfumed wax, oils or fat, which people would wear on top of their wigs to parties and feasts, in the heat of the night the wax or fat would melt releasing wonderful smells and moisturising oils.

Make your own cardboard cone hat, this can either be spritzed with perfume/aftershave, or you could stuff it with cotton wool scented with essential oils, or lemon/orange zest. Party like an Egyptian and have a good old boogie to this song.

Activity 4:

The Pharaohs wore a crown that had an image of the cobra goddess, Wadjet. Only the Pharaoh was allowed to wear the cobra goddess. It was said that she would protect them by spitting flames at their enemies.

Slink, shimmy and slither like a snake, try hissing and sticking your tongue out as far as it can go. Try a Cobra stretch or ‘Snake Arm’ dance moves. You could even craft your own Cobra.

Since snakes don’t have taste buds, they don’t “taste” things like we do. But they have a sensory organ on the roof of their mouth, which is what the tip of their tongue flicks sends the “scent-taste” signals to. In a way, they can taste and smell at the same time. Try tasting sweet, salt, sour and bitter things with just the tip of your tongue; which things can the tip of your tongue taste?

To learn more about snakes you could take an online snakes quiz.

Activity 5:

Listen to ‘Song of the Pharaoh’ here and try dancing and making facial expressions like Elvis (see here).