Play date: November 3, 3016
Theme: King Tut Day – celebrated on November 4th, the anniversary of the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt
FYI: All links are informational only. I do not make any revenue from any content in this post…simply sharing for you to enjoy and recreate this play date at home for your sweet peas!
Most of the materials for this playdate are from the “Geography Jumper: Egypt” packet created by Wise Little Owls
Get your packet here: https://goo.gl/uPIOI7
The packet costs $6.00 – well worth it for 53 printable pages. There are lots of activities to print and enjoy with your Sweet Peas!
I printed out the full-color Cover Page (pictured above), the “Fact Sheet”, the “Country Poster” and the “Flag Poster” to laminate and display in our classroom. They were all bright, welcoming our guests to the day’s theme and hanging in the background to set the scene for our play date.
— Welcome song in English (emphasizes printed name recognition as Sweet Peas find their card in a line-up and place it on our Name Ledge)
— Welcome song in Spanish (reinforces names as Sweet Peas sing to their peers)
— Discussion of theme: Showed pictures from a “Step into Reading” book called “Tut’s Mummy: Lost…and Found“, plus used the Ancient Egypt TOOB figures to introduce the day’s topic
— Storytime
— Poem/Song before we break for Centers: Alice the Camel
— Centers | Free play
— Closing
STORY TIME
The Geography Jumper included a handy little informational book about Egypt which included a map of the country, where it was located in Africa and the world, a picture of the flag, topography (desert and the Nile River), and some of Egypt’s ancient history (Pyramids of Giza, the Sphinx, mummy, sarcophagus, hieroglyphs). To tie in with education, it also talked about how long the required schooling was for Egyptian children (8 years).
POEM/SONG
Alice the Camel
https://youtu.be/9sN_RqxXGMw
LITERACY CENTER
There were two activities in this center, both from the Geography Jumper packet. One was vocabulary cards and the second was an emergent reader book.
Vocabulary Cards
Level 1: review cards for vocabulary retention
Level 2: Sort the cards into “geography” and “history” sets
Level 3: alphabetize the cards
Emergent Reader
This book reinforced all the vocabulary introduced in the “All About Egypt” book and the vocabulary cards. It is in black and white so the student could color it as well as read it. Every page starts with “Do you see” and then includes the vocabulary word that corresponds to the picture on the page.
MATH CENTER
This center was one of my own creation, using clip art from Classroom Clipart, a free on-line resource. I printed 6 camel images and mounted them onto card-stock paper. The center also included foam numbers and counting sticks.
Level 1: Count the camels out loud
Level 2: Count the camels and match the correct foam number
Level 3: Place out a foam number and have the child place the correct number of camel cards on the table
Level 4: Add in the counting sticks to Level 1-2-3 activities
Level 5: Introduce the concept of odd and even
Using the counting sticks to introduce the concept of 5 tally counting
Odd numbers have a middle
Even numbers have equal sets
Another way to visually demonstrate odd and even numbers: odd numbers have one left over, even numbers are always matched.
DISCOVERY TABLE
We hid the TOOB figures in sand and had the Sweet Peas play archeologist to unearth the treasure.
The pyramids and the sphinx we left out of the sand to give a clue on where to dig. Again, these figures could be sorted into the items discovered in King Tut’s tomb and other Egyptian figures.
IMAGINATIVE PLAY
I had our children bring out their Lego building blocks. They actually had a couple of Egyptian-ish mini-figures, and then we picked out the 2x building blocks for the Sweet Peas to play around with and build their own pyramids and palm trees. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of this activity!! I will see if they can get the parts out again soon and I will add some pictures.
ARTS & CRAFTS ~ Make & Take
This idea was also from the Geography Jumper packet by Wise Little Owls. The packet included a pattern to trace plus the instructions to create this cute little mummies.
We finish our Preschool Playdate with a sharing time: each child that wants to share gets to say what (s)he enjoyed the most about the morning. Making the mummy and digging in the sand were the two popular activities today. We also sang one more round of “Alice the Camel” since every one had so much fun singing the song the first time around!
We close with a good-bye poem and then a good-bye song where children are welcome to give hugs. It helps to set a formal end to the time together so that parents have a clear reason to insist that it’s time to go if they have somewhere to be afterwards.
Today, each guest took home an enrichment packet of four print outs from the Geography Jumper. We gave everyone the following worksheets to take home and enjoy later.
- “Glue the Pictures” – outline of the country of Egypt plus four pictures. Three of them are from the images used in the “All about Egypt” book. The activity is for the child to cut and paste the three “Egypt” images into the Egypt outline.
- “Let’s Travel” – shows a world map with a highlighted Egypt. The child finds where they live in the world and draws a line from their area on the map to the country of Egypt.
- “Egyptian Flag” – coloring page in black+white for the child to complete
- “Puppets” – coloring and cut-out page in black+white
Finished puppets glued to oversize popsicle sticks
Thanks for checking out our King Tut play date!! Check back with us next week when we share all our activities and centers for our “Native American” theme that we are going to do today.