Ancient Egypt Art Projects!

Being stuck at home with my kid due to this COVID-19 craziness has been a great opportunity to explore new arts and crafts projects. Some of these would work well in the classroom and as enrichment projects for different grade levels (for example: art for JK, SK, GR1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Social Studies for Grade 4...).

This will be the first fo several Ancient Egypt-themed arts and crafts ideas. "Melty Beads" is a great concentration craft and has served us well as a calm-down activity. This required an iron, and a "melty bead" kit (available online to order- or in most arts/crafts stores).

We started our Ancient Egyptian Gods series with a design of Horus, the falcon-headed God of the Sky. We added a sun behind him and chose the colour red to symbolize his domain.

We then chose the kind, crocodile-headed God of the Nile: Sobek. This was a lot of fun to do, trying to fit in a design of a crocodile head within the confines of the bead template. We chose light blue to represent the Nile river behind Sobek, and greens to show the lush vegetation growing along the river.

A highlight of Ancient Egyptian culture, the sarcophagus, was a natural choice for another image. We noticed that Ancient Egyptians used a lot of stripe patterns in their work, so we added some ours.

Then we did an image of Bastet, the cat Goddess of the home and fertility. We added the Great Pyramids as a pattern at the bottom as well.

Lots of fun, and a great calm-down activity that keeps kids enjoying concentrating, working with colour, pattern and creative expression and building fine-motor skills and hand-eye coordination- as well as enhancing their interest in Ancient Egyptian culture.

- Patrick