Year 5/6: Miss San s Class Spring Term 2016 In Miss San s class, our topic for this term is Ancient Egypt. We headed 5,000 years back in time to discover fascinating facts about the Ancient Egyptians... We have done lots of works on Egyptian art; many facts about what we know about the Ancient Egyptians come from their art. From the many pieces of art they created we can learn things like what they looked like, what kind of clothes they wore, what jobs they did and what they considered important. Much of the artwork created by the Ancient Egyptians had to do with their religion. They would fill the tombs of the Pharaohs with paintings and sculptures. The tomb walls of the rich and powerful were often filled with paintings. These paintings were there to help the person in the afterlife. They often depicted the person buried passing into the afterlife. They would show scenes of this person happy in the afterlife. We looked at various different artworks from Egypt and found their trademark styles, such as the colours, patterns and images they generally used. From this, we created our own Egyptian painting and we used pastels and watercolours to give our work an aging look.
We studied the history of the famous Pharaohs such as Ramesses III and Tutankhamen. We wrote our own chronological reports on how Howard Carter (an etymologist discovered the famous Tutankhamen s tomb in 1922). We also had lots of fun writing our own poems based on an ancient Egyptian poem discovered and now displayed in the British Museum. We modernised it by adding slang, repetition and rhymes. Below is an example by Summer Yerokun: The Boss I m the King, I m the boss Think you are higher, it s your loss You can see, I m the bee s knees Look up and you see me My pyramid was built of stone I m sitting on my golden throne Victory is my name Things are not the same I m the best The world is my treasure chest I m far from the west The thing that I own the most is gold
Gold is bold, gold is sold Me, myself and I We usually die but we don t lie I m the Pharaoh of Egypt Pyramids are my middle name I m the God that came I m the top ten Egypt is my den Peace The King AKA MR Bling For Music and P.E, we listened to lots of traditional and modern music relating to Egypt; including Michael Jackson s Do you remember the time. We worked in small groups to create our own dance movements based on Egyptian traditional posses (through observations of Egyptian artworks). For our final performance we came together as a class and incorporated our dances together to the tune of Walk like an Egyptian by the Bangles.
We also had an Egyptian Day, which included performances, storytelling and workshops to consolidate our understanding of Ancient Egyptian cultures. We had so much fun as we participated in role-plays, investigations and discussion about ancient Egyptian civilization.
We had so much fun and learnt so much including Ancient Egyptians believed in more than 2,000 deities! They had gods for everything from, dangers to chores! Each had different responsibilities and needed to be worshipped so that life could be kept in balance. Also, did you know the afterlife was incredibly important to the Egyptians? They believed that by preserving a dead person's body - which they did through the process of mummification - their soul would live on in the after-life forever. We have still much more to learn about the Ancient Egyptians and look forward to the next half term we will keep you posted!