The mummy!

You may recall that we did some studying of Ancient Egypt. We used the Story of The World as our guide. Carmella loved it - we read a lot of books, she especially enjoyed reading about the lives of women and children. Luckily our library had a wonderful kit put together that had books and videos we could take out for three weeks.

Some of the projects we did:

Clay cuneiform tablets - writing our names


Flooding the Nile! First line the riverbed with foil and add rocks. Put potting soil and grass seed on the sides. Then "flood" the riverbed and watch the crops grow.


I wasn't sure it would work, but the grass grew beautifully. I wish my lawn looked as good!


Then, or course, was the chicken mummy. It takes six weeks of constantly "resalting" the chicken to mummify it. We then rubbed it with oil and spices, and using a mixture of glue and water, put strips of linen all over it. Carmella wasn't too sure about touching it, so I ended up doing it myself. It definitely had a bit of an odor to it, not rotten, but not particularly fresh either.

wrapping the chicken


The mummy!


I'm not touching that thing!


These were a few websites we liked:

The Met
PBS - Nova
Some fun games

There were a few others but for some reason I can't get them to link.

Next up: The Wampanoag. But between C.'s dance recital and our trips to Hershey Park and Cape Cod, we probably won't get into it until July. But I know what C. will really want to do - dress up and act it out!

Mummies and such

For those of you who thought I was kidding when I said we were mummifying a chicken, guess again!

Mixing the salt concoction.

Drying the chicken. It is now in the mummification process. We'll let you know how it turns out. I'll give you the rundown of our entire Ancient Egypt theme soon. But for now, I have to go resalt a dead chicken in my kitchen.

Story of the World

I decided a while back that I wanted to add to our curriculum. I am very interested in history and wanted to make it fun but also keep it age-appropriate. I don't think 6 year olds have much of sense of time, especially C., who usually doesn't know what day of the week it is, let alone the concept of thousands of years. But I think it is still fun to think about the way the world "used to be" and try to learn about it.

One of my biggest hang-ups about teaching history is the question "Who's history?" In other words, from whose point of view do we teach our children about history, and of course, there's also "her-story" that needs to be told and is left out of about 99% of curriculum materials. So rather than overthink it to death, I decided just to start out with the basics, skip what didn't work for us, and add whatever needs to be added. I bought some materials called The Story of the World and started with "The Ancient World."

The first chapter starts with a story about the nomads in the area of the Fertile Crescent. It presents very basic information with ideas for a few crafts. C. LOVED it! She actually created her version of nomadic clothes and insisted on pretending to be a nomad for a few days, much to G.'s chagrin, who would have been much happier to be a superhero or puppy. We made cave paintings on crumpled up shopping bags, created a little cave and pretended to eat berries and lizards.
Carmella in her nomadic clothes doing a nomadic dance.
Carmella with one of her cave paintings. (Notice G. being quite bored and put-out by it all on the chair. I intentionally cropped his p.o.'ed facial expression.)


We have now started with Ancient Eygypt, which C. seems to be excited about. She is especially looking forward to the big activity from the book - making a real mummified chicken. Feel free to let me know if you want to help out with this one...