Making Papyrus!

This half term, in science, the Woodpeckers have been learning about materials. We identified different materials and their uses and compared them with the materials they had in Ancient Egypt and what they would have been used for. We decided to focus on paper. Did you know that the Egyptians were the first to introduce a material to write on? They made papyrus, which is where the word ‘paper’ comes from! Mrs Thornton brought in a piece of Ancient Egyptian papyrus and the children learnt that it was made from a papyrus plant, which grew on the banks of The River Nile. They then compared this with how our paper is made today. The children made their own papyrus in order to compare it and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. As we couldn’t travel to Ancient Egypt to collect some papyrus reeds, we used brown paper bags and ripped them into strips to form our flat papyrus reeds. The children had to follow the same process as the Ancient Egyptians would have done to create their paper. The children then had a go at scribing some hieroglyphics on a normal piece of paper, as well as on their papyrus, to see which one was easier to use. Well done scribes!