Monday, November 23, 2009

Hieroglyphs

In our studies on Ancient Egypt, we have been learning about their languages. Any time Kenyon or Jacinta complain about having to do any writing, I now just have to remind them that they could be doing it all in hieroglyphs where every letter or sound was a picture and there were over 700 pictures used. That should make us all a little more thankful for our 26 letter alphabet, even with all of it's confusing and complicated rules. To have a small taste of the Egyptians written language, they each had to write their names. We used this chart from our book Ancient Egypt as a guide.
The writings we saw pictured in the book all were written from top to bottom instead of left to right like we are accustomed to. This is K*E*N*Y*O*N.
The chart does not show a picture for the letter J or the letter S. Since J and H make the same sounds in several languages, we decided Jacinta would use and H and then use and S for the C. J(H)*A*C(S)*I*N*T*A. She was really nervous about having to draw birds for the letter A, especially when I pointed out that she had 2 A's in her name, but I thought she did great. She did, however, discover one of the problems I am sure the Egyptian's encountered often-having the space to write the complete word. She made her first A way to big but was able to salvage the picture by scaling down for the remaining letters.

2 comments:

Sondra said...

OH it is GOOD to catch up! LOVE the Maya Angelou poem! Your poor baby going through that infection! Are the kids' pics in the sidebar new? The girls' hair looks different... ~smile~ I'm dying to snuggle yer bunnies, and YES in agreement that only BOYS would pick their noses~LOLOL! (((((HUGS))))) sandi

char said...

Sandi,
It is nice to "see" you again! Hope all is going well with the new baby! Yes, the pictures of the girls are new-Monty kept complaining that they were OLD pictures. Keslee LOVES when I totally curl her hair so she can wear it down without frizz-Thanks to your website recommendation:)

 
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