Egyptian Mummies in English!

In order for students to understand what they are reading, they must understand how different types of materials are organized. If students can identify these basic patterns in writing then they will better understand how they must read it in order to comprehend it. This concept is a concept that I have really been focusing on with Form 3 West. We have explored how stories are written by looking at the various story elements and we have looked at how a newspaper is organized, and today we looked at how an informative text, specifically an article, is organized. We discussed that topic that the article is written about is usually mentioned in the title of the article. Then there are main ideas about that topic, followed by supporting details. We organized all this discussion into a visual that looks like this…

Topic of Article

I.               Main Idea

a.     Supporting detail

b.     Supporting detail

c.      Supporting detail

II.             Main Idea

a.     Supporting detail

b.     Supporting detail

c.      Supporting detail

I must say that as a teacher with a concentration in social studies, it has been a long two months teaching English without mention of history. So I cannot describe my excitement when I discovered a tattered (and I mean tattered) national geographic magazine on one of the bookshelves at the home. The magazine was from October 1999, it was missing it’s cover along with many other pages, and there were some pictures and articles cut out. However, I was elated to find that the article on mummies was fully intact! Of all the topics in history and all the ancient civilizations, my absolute favorite topic is ancient Egypt and mummification. So you can only imagine how excited I was to present this to my students!!!  

There was the small problem of only a single copy of the article and to make copies for even half the class would have be quite costly. However, when I read very slowly, pronouncing everything very clearly, and stopping to check for understanding after two paragraphs, my students are able to understand what I say. This is not the most efficient or effective way of teaching, but it allows me to introduce them to reading materials that they otherwise would not see. When I asked students if they had ever heard about National Geographic Magazine before there wasn’t even one student who was familiar with the magazine.

For this lesson, I read the article aloud and asked students to take notes on what they recognized as the main ideas and the supporting materials. Then as a class, we organized the article into the main points and the supporting details! 

The start of our notes...

Although my students did not quite share the same level of excitement about mummies as me, I soon learned that that was because they had never studied mummies and they didn't even know what a mummy was! This I found shocking! However, today students learned what mummies were, how they were created, and that the 150 mummies unearthed in the Valley of the Mummies showed influence of the Greeks and Romans. According to the article the influence of the Greeks and Romans diluted the strict traditional practices of the Egyptians! Fascinating stuff going on in English!