The Art of Ancient Egypt

What's better than Art of Ancient Egypt? Nothing! Second grade had a whole unit on art from the Middle East and ancient Egypt was by far their favorite. We started off with a presentation about Egypt, including all the awesome, gory details about mummies and tombs and all the good stuff. Then we played an interactive game on the Smartboard that can be found here, where you actually explore a tomb and have to solve problems to get to different parts of your underground exploration. This really set the tone for an awesome lesson because the kids were pumped. We made ancient Egyptian landscapes with repousse metal doors as our Egyptian-inspired art project. I originally got the idea from this site here, but modified it for our class.

Our first day of art making included drawing pyramids and other details onto our landscape and then coloring with colored pencils. We practiced adding all kinds of texture, like bricks and shadows for the sand. They could do a night time or day time scene. It was all great work!

Then we busted out the metal. I used a lightweight piece of sheet metal for each student. I cut them to be the same size as the paper they had just drawn their landscape on. We talked about how to treat the metal and be safe. Then I demonstrated how to use a pointed wooden tool to etch into the metal any designs the students wanted. I had up examples of hieroglyphics (which we had talked about during our first class) that I encouraged the students to use to spell out messages or just use the ones they thought looked cool.

The last step of this project was to cut the doors in half and glue onto each side of the landscape. Then we glued that whole unit onto a new piece of paper and decorated our 'background' with a striped pattern. When they're all hung up and open to see both the doors and landscape inside, they look awesome!