Walk like an Egyptian...

...which turns out to be not too dissimiliar to how we walk now so, I guess, just walk like you normally do.

As I'm prone to do, I download an enormous amount of ebooks through Amazon Kindle and then let Reo decide what direction he'd like to go.

Per-Bast: A Tale of Cats in Ancient Egypt by Lara-Dawn Stiegler. Buy it here.

Reo chose to begin reading, "Per-Bast: A Tale of Cats in Ancient Egypt" by Lara-Dawn Stiegler. It's a mythological/historical hybrid fiction that places cats front and center in ancient Egypt. It's a marvelous, creative novel that captivates and compels. I was impressed by his choice. Reo had officially decided the first quarter material of his fourth grade year.

Ancient Egypt

These things are actually the least interesting parts of ancient Egypt.

Beyond the egos of the pharaohs, we have a rich and prosperous civilization. Language, art, math, economy, cities, farmland, markets, schools, music, dance, marriage, celebration, funerals, families, traditions, religion, architecture, food!

First stop: Scribe School

Reo will get nowhere if he can't read and write the language, so it's a crash course at scribe school for both of us to get the gist of some hieroglyph basics. How do you have a crash course for a written language so intricate and articulate that it surpasses in beauty and originality any other language on earth? Clumsily, of course! But my job is to drive his curiosity wherever it wants to go. If he wants more than this crash course, he'll get more. Our school isn't about "getting by" or "just getting through it". It's about learning, understanding, and having permission to seek more.

Math is always fun!

You can probably understand why few people went to scribe school.

Reo already has a handle on addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions. So, we implemented all those mathematic methods with hieroglyphs. Does it work? Is this a more or less efficient way to calculate sums and communicate numbers?

We will continue using hieroglyphs in our following lessons as we explore more ancient Egypt. I'm especially interested to introduce him to geometry and how the ancient Egyptians used it for architecture.