The King Tut project (LS-HU-72)
The excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun caused a lot of excitement and provided a lot of new information in 1922. This was the general idea of the project and one of the motivations.
My students are between 11 and 13 years old. They have just finished learning past tenses and this project was a kind of revision combined with some extra information. They learnt about Egypt and pharaohs a year ago, but not with as many details as we had during these lessons.
Preparation
Preparation took quite a long time, but it was worth it. The idea for this learning scenario came from the Archeology collection of Europeana. Later I found two additional videos on YouTube. The longest one was used to introduce the topic and learn some related vocabulary. The shortest one contains a lot of information about the everyday life of King Tut.
I also used some images from Europeana collections and split them with an online tool to create a puzzle. Then, I generated some QR codes redirecting to the mentioned videos and solutions to the puzzle.
Tasks
Every task was built on cooperation. Some of them use technology, some of them don’t.
- Getting more information over King tut: students were introduced to the subject, using the two above mentioned videos;
- Learning some new vocabulary: at some point, students were given job titles or job descriptions. They had to pair to find the right combination;
- Discovering, together: students were assigned roles (Reporters, historians, archaeologists, graphologists) and had different tasks depending on the role they were playing. For example, archaeologists got a set of picture pieces. The pieces had events on their backs. They had to put the events in order, to create the picture. While graphologists had to solve a puzzle written in hieroglyphs. They had the key is in a QR code. They have to find the secret word.
Every group worked on a piece of information and during the last lesson, they shared what they learnt with the whole class. As an assessment, they had to answer some questions about King Tut and Howard Carter on Mentimeter.
You can find all the handouts and resources used during the lesson below:
Would you like to know more about this learning scenario? You can download it below:
Did you find this learning scenario interesting? You might also like:
The featured image used to illustrate this article belongs to the public domain. Click here to find it.