“They get married at 12! How is that possible?? They wouldn’t even have gone through all the grades by then. Well, I guess they didn’t have grades.”
6th Grade Historians completed their study this week of Ancient Egypt, presenting a “newspaper” to peers. After learning an overview from their teacher of Egypt’s geography, neighbor relations, climate, technologies, and economic and social structures, small groups chose one of the eras to research more in-depth. Using teacher-curated books, maps, and websites, students dived deeper into the lifestyle, political events, art, homes, social activities and military actions, designing a newspaper edition with headlines and stories that might have been published in that era (they used modern inventions like paper, pens, colored pencils and iPads to write and present it).
They get married at 12! How is that possible?? They wouldn’t even have gone through all the grades by then. Well, I guess they didn’t have grades.
In their newspapers, they shared facts about military training, cats, what veggies and grains were grown along the Nile, what the houses were made of and how many rooms they contained, what the weather page might have featured, and social activities they imagined based on primary source hieroglyphs (e.g swimming is portrayed; maybe they had a swimming contest?). There were ads for New iron swords! Will chop right through bronze swords! and warnings about floods.
Along the way, they have also been reading Mara, Daughter of the Nile by Eloise Jarvis McGraw. This historical fiction novel set in Ancient Egypt allows students to both practice identifying literary elements and writing summaries, while also imagining the everyday life of Ancient Egyptian people. Their teacher probed their thinking about “normal” when a student asked whether it was normal to marry so young.
A peer ventured, “Well, maybe they didn’t live as long because they had less resources and flooding? So it was harder to eat. Then you might marry young and also not live as long. So it would not seem weird because everyone was that age getting married.”