Papyrus Activity Kit

The finished sheets were fine. The kids liked feeling real papyrus after having studied it. My 8 yr old drew his own hieroglyphs on the blank sheet and my 5 yr old colored the preprinted sheet with markers. The very narrow pieces provided for making your own papyrus were pretty useless, at least for us.

This Papyrus Activity Kit made in Egypt is a wonderful way to bring a little ancient history to life right on your kitchen table It provides a creative supplement to learning about ancient writing and paper making The kit contains two sheets of ready-made papyrus in addition to enough papyrus reeds to make your own sheet plus directions Having the two ready-made sheets is particularly nice since the process of making the papyrus sheet is labor intensive and takes several days to complete The two already made sheets give children a glimpse of what the finished product will (hopefully!) turn out to look like One of the readymade sheets is printed with an intricate Egyptian design that can be painted or colored in with markers The other sheet is blank Children can make their own drawings or even practice their hieroglyphics We discovered that a good drawing pen (like Pigma Graphics) with a fine point worked well on the surface of the papyrus Making the papyrus itself provides a fine exercise in patience and in learning to follow directions! There are several steps that need to be gone through sometimes more than once The first part of the project involves soaking the papyrus reeds (at least overnight and preferably for a few days) until they swell out and become thinner when you squeeze out the excess water The reeds have an interesting slightly musty odor that smelled like no other scent we could quite place The second step involves rolling the papyrus strips out as thin as you can with a rolling pin then overlapping the strips and applying weight on top of them You may find that you need to check the strips periodically changing the paper towel and putting more books on top to make sure that they dont separate Otherwise you will end up with small sections of papyrus rather than one full sheetWhether the project comes out perfectly or not you will still have added an authentic and tactile dimension to ancient history learning Especially given how reasonable the price is I highly recommend the kit

I worked on this product for about a month and it didn't even turn out The first few directions were easy to follow but when it came to actually making the paper the directions were not understandable at all I would advise anyone who looks at this product to NOT BUY IT