During our unit on Egypt, we all made the very famous "William the Hippopotamus. He is the unofficial mascot of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Between the two schools where I work, I kept track of over 200 hippos! A few heads and legs had to be glued back onto the hippo bodies after firing, but overall we had great success with this project.
Hippos were very important to the early Egyptian people for a variety of conflicting reasons that I found on multiple websites. You can read up on him and draw your own conclusions. As for me and my students we really enjoyed learning about and creating our own William.
In the photos below, you will see our cartouche project. This was a blast for the kids because they began by learning how to write their own names using hieroglyphs and then forming a clay cartouche. They gently etched or carved their names into the wet clay, and after they were bisque fired they glazed them. The results were very impressive. We had to be extremely careful handling them before firing as they are quite thin.
You can't learn about Egyptian art without painting the eye of Horus on authentic papyrus! This paper was ordered from "Dick Blick" in Seattle, and it was a thrill to work on. I read a blog where an art teacher made papyrus from scratch using local reed type plants, but we did not have that option.
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