Day 1. Ancient Egypt Civilization (Hands-on History): King Narmer Crown

Learning homeschool history should be just as much about doing as reading living history books. So today, I’m starting a new series of hands-on history and the first one is Day 1. Ancient Egypt Civilization (Hands-on History): Narmer Crown.

My goal in this series is to focus on the ancient civilizations. It seems like plenty of hands-on history ideas abound for early American life or American history, but it can be a bit more difficult to find ideas for a study of the ancients.

Day 1. Ancient Egypt Civilization (Hands-on History): Narmer Crown

Some of these ideas in this series come from books, but many do not. They come from my experience teaching this several times over. I hope your kids, any age, will enjoy these ideas or they will help you to take a spinoff idea from mine.

Learning About Ancient Egypt Through Hands-on Art

For example, this idea for the ancient Egypt civilization of King Narmer’s double crown could easily be substituted for a picture of Cleopatra from the Cleopatra: Queen of Egypt book that we love.

Her side profile would make an excellent hands-on history idea and a fun way to learn about the time period.

Look at the easy ingredients we already had at the house for this salt dough project.

2 cups flour
1 cup of salt
1 cup warm water
paints/paint brushes. We had a combination of tempera and poster paints. Just grab what you have.
cookie tray
aluminum foil
wooden skewer and even a few toothpicks to use for drawing
big mixing bowl, dry measuring cup and liquid measuring cup
spatula or big spoon for stirring
preheat oven to 170 degrees Fahrenheit

It couldn’t be any easier or quicker to measure and mix the flour, salt, and warm water.

Stir to combine and then get your kid to use his hands to mix well.

Ancient Egypt Civilization (Hands-on History): Narmer Crown is a fun and easy history activity. Hands-on activities can make learning stick and your kid will love to make this King Narmer crown when doing an Ancient Civilization study! An easy salt dough recipe and you have a fun history activity. CLICK here to learn how to make this fun history craft!

Then line the cookie tray with foil and roll the dough out onto the platter. And start pressing down and shaping.

Try to get the same width all the way around. Tiny shaped it into looking like an ancient tablet.

Then, look for a picture your child wants to sketch or draw. Also, this could easily be turned into a cartouche.

Tiny found a sketch of King Narmer (also known as Menes) that he liked at the art factory and printed it to use for drawing.

Then using the wooden skewer and toothpick, he began sketching and drawing the design.

The beauty of working with salt dough is that until it dries your kid can erase and shape and form the picture until he gets it to look like he wants it to.

Then another advantage of salt dough is that you can take a break and let it dry overnight before painting or bake in the oven until dry. We baked it about 30 minutes and checked every 10 minutes or so.

We could tell it was dry because it was hard and there were no soft spots and of course the cracks gave it away too that it was dry.

Then Tiny mixed a few colors until he got the right color combination he wanted for the background and he painted that first. It dried pretty quickly.

Then he added a few other colors and overall this was such a fun and easy project to do while learning about Ancient Civilizations.

Also, I love, love, using Home School in the Woods hands-on ideas and projects. You will too!