Tips for Teaching Egypt

Pyramids, Cleopatra, hidden tombs, sarcophaguses, and hieroglyphics; with all interesting aspects of this era, teaching Egypt should be easy, right?  Even though the history of Egypt is full of things that are amazing, it still can be difficult to keep your students interested and help them to learn what is needed.  However, if you were to step out the normal guidelines of teaching, that is reading, watching movies, and taking notes, you might be amazed at what your students give back to you while you are teaching Egypt.  The following suggestions will help bring Egypt to life for your students, meaning Egypt will no longer be some writing in a book or a picture on a page:

• Inside of pyramids, on stone slabs, all over art work, and on vases you will find hieroglyphics; therefore when you are teaching Egypt, allow your students the opportunity to write using hieroglyphics.  It could be as something simple as writing their names or as elaborate as decoding phrases written in hieroglyphics.  This was the written language of Egypt; give your students the chance to learn it by writing it.  More than likely, the concept of hieroglyphics will stand out more once your students have written it.
• Another fun idea is to allow your students to use clay or paper Mache to build sarcophaguses.  You could take pictures of you students; allow them to glue this to the top of the sarcophagus, and then decorate it similar to real Egyptian sarcophaguses.  During this time you could discuss why sarcophaguses were used and how they were made in ancient times. This is also a great time to discuss Egyptian myths and gods as this goes hand in hand with sarcophaguses.
• This may seem a little young, but older students will enjoy it.  You can let your students turn your class room into Egypt.  Break your class into groups and assign them a certain part of history from Egypt and let them decorate a space in the classroom.  To make it a little more challenging, you can have your students write a brief report on their space and then have each group of students describe or give a brief history of what they decorated.  If you do not have one class all day long, you could always have your students to draw on poster boards instead of decorating the classroom it self.

As with teaching any subject, teaching Egypt is only as difficult and boring as you allow it to be.  You alone can make this subject interesting for your students.  If the tips above do not help, you can always research other tips on the web.  You know your students and what will be interesting to them.  When teaching Egypt, you might even ask for project ideas from your students.  You might even be surprised at the ideas they come up with. In fact, why not make it a contest to see who can come up with the most interesting project idea for Egypt, and offer a prize to the student who does.  Incentives go a long way in a classroom full of students.