7 Kirby History

From mummifying classmates to learning about ancient myths and religious beliefs, 7 Kirby has had a particularly productive semester in History so far. Focusing on Ancient societies, we started by looking at Ancient Egypt and its everyday life such as education, warfare, arts and social status, beginning with Ancient Greece shortly after. We enjoyed this unit.

One of the main ideas that we looked at was funerary customs and practices in Ancient Egypt. The Ancient Egyptians had strong beliefs and extensive rituals regarding the afterlife. The most significant was the mummification process, which required a tedious amount of care. The Ancient Egyptians had an immaculate amount of customs and beliefs associated with their mummification process. They made the bodies into “mummies” to preserve the bodies entering the afterlife. This was because they believed that the mummified body was the home of this soul or spirit. If the body was destroyed, the spirit might be lost.

The mummification process included the following 11 steps:

We all got into groups and recreated the steps, as tableaus.

Our class especially enjoyed creating scenes and tableaus as we’ve done them on various other occasions. One of our most memorable included the archaeology excavation site scenes and tableaus we created at the beginning of the year. Students were required to separate into different groups, there, we could either act out a scene or a frozen picture (a tableau). The point of the scenes was to depict the action of archaeologists’ attempt at the excavation of ancient objects such as tombs, artistic artefacts and daily artefacts. Some groups also depicted scenes of news reporting of archaeologists and their findings.

Moving on, 7 Kirby also engaged in another educational activity, a 360° VR video tour of the Giza Pyramid. Viewing an online video that allowed viewers to move 360° in any direction ensured that our class could see not only what was currently shown on the video but also its surroundings. Our class was exceedingly engaged, requesting different types of angles to be shown.

7 Kirby has immensely enjoyed recreating tableaus and scenes that corresponded to a specific part of our unit (inc. everyday life in Egypt, mummification, ancient societal beliefs and myths, warfare battle scenes), making presentations with classmates, watching documentaries about the ancient civilisation and many other interactive lessons. While we are keen to begin Geography, we will also miss learning History.