Prior to the recent school half term holidays, my 8 year old son had began to show more and more interest in both computers and what I do (most of the time) when using them, i.e. web site design and development.
I was extremely glad about this for two reasons – the first because his new found interest would help him improve his computer skills, but mainly because they and indeed the internet in general will play an increasingly bigger part of our (and his) futures.
Currently he gets ICT lessons once a week on a Friday – which isn’t enough in my opinion – but nevertheless, they are encouraged to use PCs and the internet for their homework/projects.
Consequently, the timing of his ‘Egyptian gods and godesses‘ half term project couldn’t have been better 🙂
His project entailed researching and writing about ancient Egyptian history, whether it be Egyptian gods and goddesses, Egyptian symbols, ancient Egyptian art or just simply good old fashioned ancient Egyptian history.
After some initial discussion, he decided that he wanted to do something on ancient Egyptian gods or Greek gods as I like to call them!
Great I thought, now was the time to really light the blue touch paper under his computers interest. Seizing the moment, I suggested to him that he not only use the computer to do some research on Egyptian gods for his project, but that he – with my help – did a mini Egyptian god and godesses website as well!
I’m chuffed to say that after quite a few hours of perseverance (over several days) and aided by some conditional chocolate bribery (Cadbury’s caramel is always a favourite) he finished the site, which can be seen here – www.egyptiangods.org.uk.
He did me proud and the most satisfying thing of all was seeing him not only improve his keyboard, mouse and general IT skills, but learning something new with me at the same time.
That for me – as his Dad – was priceless.