I recently finished the book “Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations” by Sam Kean and REALLY enjoyed it! It made history feel human again. Too often, the ancient world is reduced to dates, kings, empires, and artifacts sitting silently behind museum glass. Dinner with King Tut does something very different. It recreates the physical reality of the past — what people ate, how they slept, how t

One of the most challenging things to teach in history is not content—it’s thinking. How do we move students from simply seeing something to actually understanding what it tells us about the past? I designed a lesson for my Grade 10 Ancient History class on “What is a Civilization?” in an attempt to do this. Below is the lesson. Starting with a Simple Question Rather than beginning with definitions, I started with a task. Students were given a set of images showing differen