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Art Like an Egyptian

hannahcgersh
Apr 2, 2015
3 min read

In art class during the month of March, you would have found us deep in the study of Ancient Egypt. We spent a total of three weeks talking about the Egyptians and creating projects inspired by them.

My bulletin board this month looked like this!

I also decorated the door to my classroom to go with the country we're studying. I also thought it would be a great way to remind them of the countries we've already studied this year!

In Kindergarten, we read the book "Tickle Tut's Toes" and colored pictures of King Tut "realistically." Realistically is in quotes because, well, this is Kindergarten. We also learned about the Pyramids of Giza and we designed our own pyramids with Egyptian hieroglyphs! I used large yellow sheets of construction paper and had the students draw and cut out a big triangle! Then, they decorated them with colored pencils. You can find this lesson plan at my Teachers Pay Teachers store here.

In first grade, we made pyramid landscapes! These turned out really great! We used brown oil pastels to trace a border around the paper with a ruler and draw our landscape with. We painted the borders with metallic tempera paint. I had planned for the landscape itself to be painted with watercolors, but I ran out in the middle of the week (because watercolors go way too fast in my art room- does anyone else have this problem?) so some classes had to use tempera paint instead. We used ALL warm colors for this project. We also talked about heiroglyphs and we drew those on the border, too! These were done with watercolors before we wrote the heiroglyphs.

And these were done with tempera paint after the heiroglyphs. You can find my lesson plan for this project here.

Second grade did a really fun project from a blog called Use Your Coloured Pencils. We used toilet paper rolls, tape, metallic tempera paint, and black markers to make EGYPTIAN CAT MUMMIES!

The black markers smeared a little. Sharpies worked much better!

Third graders learned about the Egyptians' love of cats and learned how to draw an Egyptian cat. There was a certain fiasco during one of my third grade classes that could have spoiled their learning, but DID NOT. A wasp (at least, I think it was a wasp) took up residence in my art classroom in early March (since, you know, the art room is a collection of all kinds of smells, bugs, and strange things) and I was surprised at how long it lived. I kept thinking, "I should really check into how many lunch crumbs I leave in my classroom!" When said wasp, whom we named Bob, came out of hiding, my students FREAKED OUT. There was complete chaos as Bob flew around the classroom, weaving in and out and around students. Every eye was on Bob and as soon as he came close enough, students started ducking and doing backbends to get out of his way. Until, finally, Bob flew head-first into a bucket of water at the "blue table." He drowned shortly thereafter. Third graders were sad, but relieved.

For our Egyptian cats, we drew our border with a ruler and pencils. Later, we painted it in with metallic tempera paint and added hieroglyphs. We drew our cats with pencils, then traced our lines with a black marker. We colored them in with crayons. Click here to get this lesson plan from my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

Fourth and sixth grades did a variation on the same project from Deep Space Sparkle. It's called Egyptian Faces. Fourth graders drew an Egyptian face from the front view. They also drew a border and painted it in with metallic gold tempera paint and added hieroglyphs. They loved getting to design their own headresses!

Sixth graders drew from a profile view. Everything else about the project was exactly the same as fourth grade.

Fifth graders got to do a special project with scratchboard inspired by Drip, Drip, Splatter Splash. We talked about Egyptian amulets and the ankh, the Egyptian hieroglyph for the word "life." We used scratchboard to draw ankhs and then we embellished them with neon acrylic paint.