Ancient Egypt | Mrs Stewart's Superstars

We have been using our topic of Ancient Egypt to look at the features of non-fiction books.

We have been learning to use a dictionary to look up some of our topic words. We have learned that a dictionary has two purposes – to help us spell words correctly and also to help us find out what the word means.

009 — We are working in pairs to find topic words.

We have found out that most of our topic books have something called a glossary at the back. Like dictionaries, we have found out that these are arranged in alphabetical order. A glossary is much shorter and gives us the meaning of some of the words in a book which we might not know.

We worked with partners to choose words from a topic book which we did not know the meaning of. We wrote the meaning of these, from the glossary, and then shared them with another pair of children in our class.

We are learning lots of new vocabulary.

Our new topic for this term is Ancient Egypt.

Last week we learned where Egypt was by looking at pictures and the globe. We discussed the meaning of ancient and modern and made a wallwisher about some of the things we thought we already knew.

We learned why the River Nile was so important to the people of Ancient Egypt.

We found out that the Ancient Egyptians used the Nile to irrigate their fields to grow food. We were a bit unsure about the meaning of “irrigate” so Mrs Stewart showed us in the sand tray!

We found out thet the Ancient Egyptians also used something called a shaduf to lift water from the banks of the River Nile up to water their fields. We looked at some pictures of a shaduf online and then worked together in groups to make our own.

Mrs Bailey, our lovely classroom assistant, had already made one to show us. We tried it out in our newly irrigated sand tray!