At the beginning of the year I booked the kids into two history workshops at the British Museum.  We went to our first workshop this week and it was brilliant.  I honestly had no idea what to expect but at only £2 a kid I thought it was worth a try.  The presenter was friendly and chatted to the kids, answering all their questions, even when the kids went on a bit of a tangent.  She had set up a lovely short talk, with maps and pictures, she engaged the kids with an activity and even had them posing in front of a green screen so they could create their own version of a tomb painting.  I was really impressed that the British museum have created workshops for Home educated kids and that they clearly went to a lot of effort to make it informative and engaging.

Since we were at the museum for the workshop the kids and I also walked around the Egyptian section.  We have been before but their Egyptian rooms are really worth a visit and it was nice going back the second time as now we knew a bit more about the mummification process and hieroglyphs.

I knew we were going to be out for a long day and that it would probably be busy and noisy so I made sure I had an activity packed in my bag.  One of the things I have learnt is when we are out in a busy, noisy environment it helps to give the kids a break and let them focus on something else.  We found a nice quite corner in the museum and both kids had a go at writing in hieroglyphs.

Both of my kids love the idea of writing in code or in different languages so I knew something like this would be a welcome break for them.  I downloaded the Egyptian Hieroglyphs page from Twinkl (it is part of their paid for Classic package) but they also have a FREE version – Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

The Hieroglyphs was such a hit with my two that they have been writing out more words and phrases at home and I now have a few scrolls with hieroglyphs on them (yes scrolls – my youngest insists that if you write anything in an Ancient format it MUST be in a scroll format).

My kids also liked the Ancient Egyptian fact posters (Twinkl Classic).  They are a nice summary of key events and facts.

You might also be interested in these Egyptian pages from Twinkl Egyptian writing pages (Free to download), the Design a Sarcophagus (Paid for Classic) and the Egyptian Clothing and Food poster (Classic).

Both the kids and I are already looking forward to our next British Museum workshop and history theme – Ancient Greece (I will write a another post on our favourite Egyptian book before we get into the Greece activities).