My children have enjoyed drawing hieroglyphs and rubber stamping them. (If you want to see the hieroglyph rubber stamps, look at my YouTube video on Ancient Egypt.) My 10-year-old son said that he was a scribe, and he wrote a full page of hieroglyphs in pencil, telling a story. He rolled up the sheet of paper, came over to me, and said, “Where is my Ancient Egypt costume?” I told him the one I made was too small; that it was his brother Stephen’s now. Maybe next week or the week after I’ll make him another one. (Besides, I’m still figuring out how to spread the fabric glue faster, because for my conference workshop next March, I’ll be doing a workshop entitled “Using Simple Costumes and Props to Teach the Bible.” In that conference workshop, my opening act is to make a simple Bible costume in five minutes with no sewing. I’m researching the fastest way to make it.)
Anyway, my son wanted to be an Egyptian scribe because, he said, his work contained all the wisdom of Ancient Egypt.
For rubber stamping the hierpglyphs, we dipped the rubber stamp (with one hieroglyph on it) into some gold paint. Then we stamped it on black paper. I’ve never seen that done before. I just made it up because it looked cool. To make it easier, put a very shallow puddle in a wide jar lid. Then when you dip it, it won’t be completely immersed in gold paint. (Yellowish-gold paint is the best color for this project.)
Bryan wrote the following message in hieroglyphs (he made this up out of his imagination): “The black bird flying over a red sunset is a good omen. A bad omen is a viper sitting in the garden.”
Stephen wrote: “A good omen is a flower at sunrise. A bad omen is a vulture around a pyramid.” He just made that up, too, based on Bryan’s sentence structure.
My daughter just rubber stamped the entire hieroglyph alphabet, and Nathaniel wrote a simple sentence and signed his name, all in hieroglyphs.
Later when we watched a video about Egypt, the kids were actually reading the hieroglyphs on the walls of Egyptian tombs! They recognized the different sounds, anyways. I thought that was neat.
Tags: Ancient Egypt, early history, Egypt, hieroglyphs, history, Homeschooling
