Egypt Night

As part of their study of ancient Egypt, my daughter and her co-op partner chose to host an Egypt Night.  Here they are wrapped in the traditional muslin (sheets) garb of  the ancient Egyptians with faces done up and everything.  Being teen girls, I think they liked this part best and they spent oodles of time figuring and refiguring their robes, accesorizing and reapplying gobs of eye makeup. 

To start out the evening, they served traditional Egyptian food such as lentils with rice with a red sauce, boiled eggs topped with beans and parsley, lentil soup, bread, beef in a brown sauce (kind of like beef stew), cucumbers in a dill sauce and delicious honey bread for dessert which probably has another name but I don't remember what it was.  Basically it was stale bread drenched with honey.  I was pleased with the younger kids who tried these not unusual foods prepared in very unusual ways.  But there were no rude sounds coming from their table so I was very happy.  Most everything was good albeit not my kind of food and I probably won't make these dishes again.  It was interesting to taste what they would have tasted all the time and considered common.  They ate a lot of lentils!

After dinner the girls entertained us with a short skit.  In this portion of the skit, the girl on the right is ripping her heart out to have it weighed.  If she does not have a "good enough heart" it will be thrown to the crocodile to be eaten and she will not be allowed to go to the underworld.  She will die forever.  Jake the dog played the part of the crocodile.  He did very well too and gobbled her heart right up.

During the weeks leading up to the event they each studied the region, wrote reports on pharoahs, mummies and pyramids and they also put together some great items to display for the crowd attending Egypt Night.  There were short blurbs about Egypt posted on the walls here and there and items such as this hook and flail dd made out of aluminum foil, beads and electrical tape.  She gave it sturdiness using a wooden dowel and a coat hanger.  The fan folded item in the center is a "beard" made of paper to resemble the type the pharoahs would have worn.  Interesting to learn, much of what they wore was not their own.

They also had a couple games to entertain us with.   One we all played together was actually an ancient Sumerian game but we found it to be a good choice for Egypt Night too.  It was played with a game board dd made up a few weeks prior and tokens which had to moved from one oend of the board to the other.  You could play as individuals or as teams.  Although the board looked nothing like it, the play of the game was similar to that of modern day Sorry.

And the other game was pin the pyramid on Egypt.  The kids had fun trying to get the pyramids in the right places.

All of the game ideas, reports, recipes and crafts were from our latest KONOS adventure, History of the World I their high school curriculum in which my oldest daughter is working from this year.