Teacher Commentary

The reason I start with brainstorming students’ prior knowledge is because what they know is generally about mummies, pharaohs, and pyramids. I use that as a jumping off point to say, “As I’m looking at the list of things you know, it seems like most of what you know is about the most elite members of Ancient Egyptian society.” Then I tie that into the essential question about ordinary people, and say, “This question really gets at what we don’t know very much about, which is the lives of the people who weren’t rich pharaohs, but just normal everyday people.”