Week Four Essay: Ancient Egypt Unit

Sphinx. Wiki Commons. 

This week, I decided to write my essay over assessing the reading unit entitled, "Ancient Egypt." I did this for several reasons. First, I absolutely loved this unit. I learned so much about ancient Egypt culture and legends that I had never heard of before. Secondly, I decided to assess this unit because there weren't any notes on the readings yet. I decided that some input from a student's point of view could be great to helping improve this reading unit.

I had several favorite readings in the unit. Firstly, I really enjoyed the fact that there were whole series of stories within this unit. Not every story stood alone so the stories of the Two Brothers (http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/06/egypt-two-brothers-part-one.html) and the Book of Thoth (http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/06/egypt-book-of-thoth-part-one.html)were interesting for me. In past units I have read, many of the stories were stand-alone so I really liked this continuity. As for stories that I had difficulty understanding, I think some notes could have helped. I tried to do some research for the stories of The Sun's Journey (http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/06/egypt-suns-journey.html) and The King of the Dead (http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/06/egypt-king-of-dead.html). I didn't realize just how many gods the ancient Egyptian stories had in them so the large number of characters and names were a little confusing for me as I was reading.

Something different I found was that not all ancient Egyptian stories were about gods. For instance, the Green Jewel story was about magic, something I didn't know existed in the ancient world of Egypt. The unit was very different than I was expected, but I still really liked it. There were a wide range of stories so having that in the description but draw students towards it.

Overall, I really enjoyed this unit. I learned a lot about ancient Egyptian culture that I didn't know before and it gave me an even larger appreciation for the storytellers in ancient Egypt. These stories are so old, yet are still being passed down, which is something I think is just so neat. I enjoyed this unit and I would encourage anyone to read it!

Link to reading unit: http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/06/myth-folklore-unit-ancient-egyptian.html