A few years ago when I was working closely with the staff at Belleville school in South London, we discussed the sort of texts you might like to use when teaching Ancient Egypt at KS2. I was keen to recommend Maat’s feather a story of Qen, a young boy growing up in ancient Egypt. It works because pupils identify with the boy leaving an ordinary life. Crucially he is from He is part of a farming family so this reminds us how dependent the ancient Egyptians were on the River Nile. They work farmland belonging to the temple. You get a real feel for the everyday lives of an ordinary family in ancient Egypt, , the way their life is dominated by officials and the temple, the food they eat and the houses they live in. As the Nile floods, and they cannot work on their farm, they are employed by the priests to work in a quarry cutting stone for a new temple. Then his life takes an unexpected turn which I won’t spoil for you..
