Egypt Game Teacher Guide
The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder ABOUT THIS BOOK In The Egypt Game, April Hall, an insecure and lonely 11-year-old, comes to live with her grandmother and surprises herself when she forms an immediate friendship with her neighbor Melanie Ross. April and Melanie, who share an unusual interest in ancient Egypt, use their intellect and vivid imaginations to develop an elaborate game of 'Egypt.' Gradually, the game becomes more and more real, and frightening things begin to happen in the neighborhood. The children are faced with a soul-searching question: Has the game gone too far? Snyder develops a theme of unconditional friendship in the novel, demonstrating the unique ability of children to form communities that compensate for a lack of family structure and affection. Although April tries to hide her longing for the father she never knew, her hurt at her mother's neglect, and her insecurity in her new surroundings, she finds an extended family through the friendships of the Egypt group.
Melanie Ross, a black eleven-year-old, accepts her friendship despite April's bragging, lying, strange manner of dress, and eccentric behavior. The deserted storage yard and shed behind the A-Z Antique and Curio Shop becomes the Land of Egypt for April and Melanie, who spend every available moment playing the Egypt game. Eventually other children are drawn into the game which culminates in the capture of a murderer. The book has originality, and verve in plot, style, and characterization.'
-'School Library Journal' starred review. The Egypt Game Written by Yearling Trade Paperback December 1985 $6.50 978-0-440-42225-9 (0-440-42225-6). TEACHERS GUIDE ABOUT THIS BOOK In The Egypt Game, April Hall, an insecure and lonely 11-year-old, comes to live with her grandmother and surprises herself when she forms an immediate friendship with her neighbor Melanie Ross.
April and Melanie, who share an unusual interest in ancient Egypt, use their intellect and vivid imaginations to develop an elaborate game of 'Egypt.' Gradually, the game becomes more and more real, and frightening things begin to happen in the neighborhood. The children are faced with a soul-searching question: Has the game gone too far?
The following book is also discussed in this guide: The Gypsy Game The kids from The Egypt Game are back, and they're ready to play a new game-Gypsies. In The Gypsy Game, when April and Melanie present their new game to the gang they discover an intriguing fact: their friend Toby Alvillar claims to be 'a real, live, authentic Gypsy.' As the friends develop their new game, Toby becomes distant and strange. Then one day, Toby disappears and the group is on a search that leads them toward a new understanding of family and friendship. ABOUT THIS AUTHOR Raised in California, in the country-with no television and few movies to watch-three-time Newbery Honor winner Zilpha Keatley Snyder filled her childhood with animals, games, and books.
Among her earliest acquaintances were cows, goats, ducks, chickens, rabbits, dogs, cats, and horses. In fact, her family's animals were her closest friends, and a nearby library was a constant source of magic, adventure, and excitement for her. And when she wasn't reading or playing with animals, Snyder made up games and stories to entertain herself.
While Zilpha Keatley Snyder was growing up, interesting stories filled her household. Both of her parents spent a lot of time relating accounts of past events in their lives, so Snyder came by her storytelling instincts early. But unlike her parents, when Zilpha had something to tell, she had, as she says, 'an irresistible urge to make it worth telling.
And without the rich and rather lengthy past that my parents had to draw on, I was forced to rely on the one commodity of which I had an adequate supply-imagination.' Consequently, at the age of eight, Zilpha Keatley Snyder decided to become a writer. TEACHING IDEAS Pre-Reading Activity The Egypt Game and The Gypsy Game depict a special friendship that develops among six diverse characters. Ask students to write a journal entry about one of their friends who is most unlike them. What makes their friendship special?
Encourage them to share their writing with the class. Thematic Connections Friendship In The Egypt Game, Melanie looks forward to meeting April. Ask students what Melanie's first impression is of April. How are the girls alike? How are they different? In many friendships, one person emerges as the leader. Trace the friendship that develops between Melanie and April as they engage in the games of 'Egypt' and 'Gypsy.'
Which girl appears to be the leader? Describe Ken and Toby's friendship. Why do Melanie and April include Ken, Toby, Marshall, and Elizabeth in their games? How can children from such different backgrounds become such good friends? What do each of the six children gain from their friendship?
How does the Professor become their friend? Abandonment There are several characters who feel abandoned by friends and family.
In The Egypt Game, April feels that her mother abandons her when she sends her to live with her grandmother. In The Gypsy Game, Toby's security is threatened when his maternal grandparents try to take him from his father. Ask students to compare and contrast the way April and Toby deal with their feelings of insecurity and abandonment. Describe how each of the following characters may also feel abandoned: the Professor in The Egypt Game; Garbo in The Gypsy Game; Bruno, the dog in The Gypsy Game. Family and Relationships Melanie, Marshall, and Ken are the only characters in the novels who live in a traditional family. At what point does April begin to accept that she and her grandmother are a family in The Egypt Game? How does their relationship grow in The Gypsy Game?
Ask students to make a special Mother's Day card that April might give to her grandmother. A Sense of Community The 'Egypt' and 'Gypsy' games provide the children with a sense of community and teamwork. How does the neighborhood surrounding the Casa Rosada rally behind the Professor? How do the children use their 'Gypsy Game' to help Toby? How does finding Toby lead the children toward serving the homeless in their community? Interdisciplinary Connections Language Arts Each participant in The Egypt Game chooses an Egyptian name and its hieroglyphic symbol.
Send students to the library to research the gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt. Have them select an Egyptian name for themselves, create its hieroglyphic symbol, and write a short paragraph telling why they selected their particular names.
Make a class chart of the names and symbols. Mysteries are solved in The Egypt Game and The Gypsy Game. At the end of The Egypt Game, April and Marshall's picture is in the newspaper along with a story about how Marshall helped the Professor save April. Ask students to write the article that appears in the newspaper. Instruct them to include quotations from each of the children of 'Egypt,' various people from the neighborhood, and the Professor.
Social Studies April and her friends conduct research about Egyptians and Gypsies before engaging in their games. Ask the class to name other ancient cultures that they have studied, such as the Incas and Aztecs, and the ancient Babylonians, Chinese, and Greeks. Divide the class into groups, allowing each to select one culture to research the facts needed to create a new game. After the groups share their research with the class, ask which of the cultures researched would most likely interest April and Melanie and why. The Egypt Game, the children decide to perform an Egyptian 'Ceremony for the Dead.'
They think they will mummify the bird. Ask students to research the process of mummification. How can scientists determine the age of ancient mummies?
Use Of Language In The Egypt Game, the children develop their own alphabet, much as the Egyptians had, in order to write secret messages to one another. Ask the class to develop a similar alphabet. Divide the class into small groups and ask them to use the alphabet to write a secret message that they would send to April, Melanie, and the other children of 'Egypt.' Encourage the groups to exchange their secret messages for translation.
Teaching ideas prepared by Pat Scales, director of library services, The South Carolina Governor's School for Arts and Humanities, Greenville, South Carolina. CyberGuide by Please forward your comments to the and/or the author of the CyberGuide. Introduction This supplemental unit to The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder was developed as part of the Schools of California Online Resources for Educators (SCORE) Project, funded by the California Technology Assistance Program (CTAP) and the California County Superintendents Educational Services Association (CCSESA). Disclaimer: The links here have been scrutinized for their grade and age appropriateness; however, contents of links on the World Wide Web change continuously. It is advisable that teachers review all links before introducing CyberGuides to students. This unit was designed to integrate sixth grade core literature with social studies, art, and technology including current online information resources.
(Examples from Grade 6). To practice research and comprehension skills using technology as a tool Writing Strategies Standard 1.4. To deliver informative presentations that develop the topic with facts, details, examples, and explanations from multiple authoritative sources Speaking Applications Standard 2.2. To write a. Writing Application 2.2.
To demonstrate learning through Listening and Speaking Strategies Standard 1.6. Overview These activities may all be used or may stand alone and be non-sequential. They can be used with a variety of formats: literature circle, whole class read aloud or independent reading. Students may use the Internet in pairs or groups rotating through a classroom computer station or the unit may be a whole class activity in a computer lab. Activity One should be used as the students begin the book, The Egypt Game. Activities Two and Three should be started after the introduction to antiques in The Professor's A-Z Antique Store (p. 20 in the book).
Activities Four and Five are intended to be used after the first half of the book is read. At the end of the activities, the class will display student products which demonstrate their learning during this unit. Teachers may interchange online activities with library research skills for some of the lessons. Students will:. Make a map of Ancient Egypt. Create a table or data base of information on Egyptian artifacts. Use hieroglyphics to make their names or words.
Produce a multimedia report. Design an Egyptian art display.
I was in second grade the first time I went to Egypt. Every Friday, I took a bus to another elementary school across town in order to attend a Gifted and Talented Education program. Once a week, I lived a separate school life, at a different campus with a different teacher and different friends. My teacher, Betty Rose Gunn, was warm and loud and cheerful, the kind of grownup you could trust not to impose stupid rules or assign math homework. It hardly felt like school at all, and no one at my real school knew anything about it. That year, we were doing units on ancient Egypt and feudal Japan, and so after lunch Mrs.
Gunn would read aloud from Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Egypt Game. Published in 1967 by Atheneum, the novel celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in 2017. The story begins with “The Discovery of Egypt”: April and Melanie, both eleven years old, and Melanie’s four-year-old brother Marshall climb through a hole in the fence surrounding the unused yard of an antiques store owned by the “Professor.” Over the next few months, the children, soon joined by new “Egyptians” Elizabeth, Toby, and Ken, use scavenged odds and ends to create their own, secret version of ancient Egypt. The murder of a young girl in the neighborhood puts the grownups on alert, which makes visiting “Egypt” a much trickier proposition.
At the novel’s climax, April and Marshall go there at night to retrieve a forgotten textbook — and encounter the killer. Tragedy is averted with the help of the Professor. Afterwards, the Egyptians, assuming the Egypt Game is “lost and gone forever,” reflect that it had been a terrific game, full of excitement and mystery and way-out imagining, but it had been a great deal more than that. It had been a place to get away to — a private lair — a secret seclusion meant to be shared with best friends only — a life unknown to grown-ups and lived by kids alone. However, the Professor — who’d been withdrawn and apathetic since the death of his wife and is drawn back into the community by the children — understands the importance of the children’s invented world, and gives them each a key to the now-padlocked yard to continue their play.
The Egypt Game Teacher Guide
That second-grade year was, for me, a bit like this imagined Egypt: a secret world shared among only a few, with an adventure waiting to be continuedthe following week. Other books that made a lasting impression on me in my elementary-school years include A Wrinkle in Time, The Lives of Christopher Chant, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Frankweiler, Harriet the Spy, and Bridge to Terabithia. The Egypt Game combines all my favorite bits and pieces from these books: a secret world within our own, ingenuity and imagination, the potential of magic, adventure made possible through childhood autonomy — plus the extra, delicious thrill of a murder mystery. But what resonates most with me now is the sense that Egypt, as the “Egypt gang” creates and experiences it, is intrinsically connected to reading. April and Melanie are voracious readers who build the foundations of their Egypt — and their friendship itself — on books.
In their very first meeting, the girls discover their shared love of reading and of “imagining games.” When, on one of their almost-daily library trips, April comes across a book about ancient Egypt, the new friends become obsessed: Before long, with the help of a sympathetic librarian, they had found and read just about everything the library had to offer on Egypt — both fact and fiction. They read about Egypt in the library during the day, and at home in the evening, and in bed late at night when they were supposed to be asleep. Then in the mornings while they helped each other with their chores they discussed the things they had found out.
In a matter of weeks the girls have written their own variation on the Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet. As their gang expands to include Marshall, Elizabeth, Toby, and Ken, they perform rituals and adopt personas based on what they have read. The scope of the Egyptians’ imagining is vast, and unfettered by historical fact: the villainous god Set’s instruments of evil, for example, range “from atomic ray guns to sulfur and brimstone.” That’s one of the best things about the Egypt Game for its players: “Nobody ever planned it ahead, at least, not very far.
Ideas began and grew and afterwards it was hard to remember just how. That was one of the mysterious and fascinating things about it.”. The Egypt Game garnered author Snyder the first of three Newbery Honors (followed in 1972 by The Headless Cupid and in 1973 by The Witches of Worm).
Not everyone agreed with the Newbery committee that The Egypt Game was “distinguished,” however. In her April 1967 Horn Book Magazine review Ruth Hill Viguers wrote: The story moves with suspense and humor, despite evidence that the ingredients were deliberately assembled.
The characters, though delightfully real, appear to have been carefully selected to represent a cross section of middle-class Americans, including a lonely child from Hollywood newly come to stay with her grandmother, a Negro girl and her little brother, a Chinese-American girl, a Japanese-American boyThere is little doubt about the appeal of this lively book with its up-to-the-minute speech and situations, even though it was obviously written to fill current “needs” and will soon be dated. One always hopes, however, for a book of lasting quality from so sensitive and competent a writer as Mrs. How’s that for a backhanded compliment?
Commentary by Zena Sutherland, Viguers’s fellow Great Lady of children’s literature, in the May 13, 1967, issue of the Saturday Review, was also somewhat mixed, but positive overall: This may prove to be one of the controversial books of the decade: it is strong in characterization, the dialogue is superb, the plot is original, and the sequences in which the children are engaged in sustained imaginative play are fascinating, and often very funny. On the other hand, the murder scare and the taciturn, gloomy Professor seem grim notes. In contrast to Viguers, Sutherland praised the characters’ ethnic diversity: “The fact that the children are white, Negro, and Oriental seems not a device but a natural consequence of grouping in a heterogeneous community.” Ultimately, like the Newbery committee, Sutherland concluded that “ The Egypt Game is a distinguished book.” Perhaps in response to criticism like Viguers’s, Snyder (who was white) wrote in an introduction to later editions: I was teaching in Berkeley, California, while my husband was in graduate school. My classes usually consisted of American kids of all races, as well as a few whose parents were graduate students from other countries. All six of the main characters in The Egypt Game are based, loosely but with ethnic accuracy, on people who were in my class one year — even Marshall, whom I had to imagine backward in time to four years of age. The ethnic diversity of this group of friends is entirely appropriate to Snyder’s setting, a Berkeley-esque university city where there are “boys and girls of every size and style and color, some of whom could speak more than one language when they wanted to.” And it’s welcome.
Even as we champion diverse books today, multicultural books are often not so much multicultural as they are representative of one particular facet of society outside “the white default.” It’s still somewhat rare to see a heterogeneous group of friends in a children’s novel. The child characters themselves do acknowledge difference — and then move on. When April’s grandmother suggests that new-to-town April might make a friend in downstairs neighbor Melanie, she carefully mentions that Melanie and her family are “Negroes” (“African Americans” in some later editions). April shrugs it off as a non-issue: she and her mother “know a lot” of African American people, she says. Though Snyder’s original terminology is now out of date, most other mentions of race and ethnicity are matter-of-factly descriptive. Additionally, Melanie makes an offhanded comment about demonstrations she and Marshall have attended with their parents at the university, presumably demonstrations for civil rights, against the Vietnam War, or both. It’s a subtle reminder of the social upheaval of that era, and Snyder’s use of casual diversity reflects her own progressive worldview.
Viguers’s assertion that the novel would be dated because of its ethnically diverse cast now seems almost laughable, given the minimal progress we’ve made toward inclusion in children’s books in the past fifty years. What remains problematic, though, is the way the children play at a culture outside their own. They adopt what they view as the most exciting or fascinating parts of ancient Egyptian society and spirituality. Despite their considerable research, the children often regard ancient Egypt as almost fantastical, and the existence of modern-day Egyptians never seems to cross their minds. Almost equally fantastical-seeming today is the type of freedom from adult supervision (/meddling) that the children enjoy. Perhaps in 1967 kids like the Egypt gang really were able to play outside in abandoned lots, but today’s reality (in most places in the United States for middle-class kids) is quite different. However, that tradition of unsupervised exploration is a vital part of children’s fiction.
Can you imagine the Harry Potter books, for instance, without Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s propensity to sneak out of their beds at night, investigating precisely the places forbidden to them? Or Claudia and Jamie Kincaid doing, well, any of the things they did in From the Mixed-Up Files? Or Harriet’s spy route, for that matter? The lack of supervision the Egypt gang enjoys (both outdoors and at home) for most of the novel seems utterly unthinkable now.
How do we reconcile the agency fictional children must have with the extremely limited freedom of real-life kids? This dilemma is one that writers of today (and presumably the future) must grapple with in ways that authors of previous decades likely did not. As I write this, it’s the end of October — the perfect time of year to revisit a story about mysteries and maybe-magic. (Halloween night even plays a major part in The Egypt Game’s plot.) This year, October also marks the second anniversary of Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s death. I remember the pang I felt when I read that she had died. Oh, I thought.
No more Egypt. Of course, that’s hardly the case.
For one thing, there’s the real-life Egypt. Though far removed from the ancient society that so fascinates the Egypt gang, modern Egypt has its own vibrant and complex culture, and one can still find glimpses of the real ancient Egypt. There also are artifacts from throughout Egypt’s history (many plundered from tombs by imperialist explorers, to be sure) housed in museums and private collections around the world. A short walk from The Horn Book’s office in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts boasts an extensive ancient Egypt exhibit.
But the Egypt of The Egypt Game never was either of these Egypts; it is its own world entirely, one that encompasses both ancient(ish) rituals and atomic ray guns. And it is eternal, always ready in the novel’s pages for readers’ return.
Egypt Game Study Guide
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