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.