Pyramid Lesson for Kids

During a very in-depth study of Egypt, I found several ways to teach the art of Egypt. One was by making salt-dough pyramids. Helping kids realize that the material used for different structures around the world was fascinating to them. Talking about Mt. Rushmore, The Liberty Bell, Statute of Liberty, etc. gave them a different perspective of how difficult it was to work with any material as far as structure is concerned. Working with salt-dough, gave the impression of working with sand stone.

We discussed and read from several books that shared information on pyramid building, the original pyramids, and how the Pyramids of Giza were thought to be built, from a collection of books from the local library as well as Usborne's books on the Ancient Egyptians.

First, I printed out templates of a pyramid shape, which are easily found online. I then taped these together as needed to apply the salt-dough material.

Salt dough is a substance like play-doh, just homemade. It is easier to work with for teaching structure, which was the foundation for the lesson on building pyramids.

The salt dough mixture is 1 cup flour, 1 cup salt, and ½ cup of water. After mixing, you can also include any food coloring. We chose yellow for our pyramids, and mixed until the consistency resembled that of sand.

The salt-dough was applied to cover the paper pyramids and allowed to dry. Some kids made blocks to stack on top of each other. Some rolled out the dough as much as possible to cover the pyramid, and they call came out differently, but all a success. The salt-dough dries in about 72 hours and it glistens due to the salt content. For more detail, students could write hieroglyphs within the dough with a toothpick. I did this on my personal pyramid before sharing the activity with the kids. My pyramid cracked a little due to the toothpick marks, but it also allowed me to share the ability for the Egyptians to build such magnificent pyramids with sand and it last for centuries.

Together with discussion and sharing a couple stories about the Egyptians, this lesson takes about an hour, and could be expanded for older kids.