Use the stickers and the key to write a word - maybe your name - or a message.

Spell according to the sounds, not the actual spellings in English.

Get somebody else to try and decode what you have written.

Egyptian hieroglyphics is a stylised form of writing that decorated tombs, temples and monuments. They were regarded as holy and magical. For everyday writing, the Egyptians used a script called 'hieratic'. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 enabled experts to decipher hieroglyphics for the first time. It was a marker stone inscribed with the same text in Egyptian and Greek.

Encourage your pupils to be aware of some of these principles when creating their code:

Hieroglyphs can be written in columns or rows and they can run left to right or right to left. The creatures face towards the start of the sentence. Some symbols can be stacked so they fit better. In these cases, the top one is read before the lower.

Some hieroglyphs represent single sounds - mainly consonants. Many vowel sounds are not represented with hieroglyphs. Other hieroglyphs represent clusters of sounds making a syllable.

Some hieroglyphs are used for whole words. Where this occurs, the symbol is followed by an upright stroke.

N.B. Like many languages, Egyptian has a different set of phonemes to English. Some licence has been used to correlate hieroglyphs to the English phonemes, e.g. /th/ doesn't exist in Egyptian so has been mapped to the hieroglyph for the similar phoneme /z/.