Going Back in Time--Destination: Ancient Egypt

It's hard to believe that we've come full circle and are now beginning our 4 year cycle of history once again. Five years ago we started with a group of friends using The Story of the World as the basis for our history studies. We've traveled through time to ancient history, medieval, Renaissance on up to modern day for the past 4 years. Now we start the cycle again.

We are having fun learning about Ancient Egypt.....our first stop on the activities list was mummifying a chicken.

Pyramids, mummies and Pharaohs are probably the most famous concepts of Egypt--my kids were fascinated with them as well. We could have mummified a Barbie doll, but no, they wanted to have a more 'real' experience. They chose to mummify a chicken....which I modified to a chicken leg.

We knew the process would be lenghty and messy, we thought we'd try an apple too, just to see if it works.

We gathered our embalming salts and spices. Cleaned the chicken and apple, patted it dry and then...

placed the chicken in plastic bags covered with the aromatic salts to begin the drying process.

After 2 weeks of changing the salt every day or so, Connor exclaimed "Okay, I get it. It took a long time and a whole lot of salt to make a mummy." Yep, that pretty much sums it up.

They got bored with the activity (which is what I had feared, and is why I wanted to mummify a Barbie) after 4 weeks of sitting around unattended I threw out the bags. They learned something and now my counter is no longer cluttered with yuck!

Surprisingly, Delaney is very interested in mummies. She's usually scared of all things gross.

Yet, she finds it interesting how they Egyptians prepared a body to be a mummy. We'll be finding a doll and try this again.....only get it all done in one day! Stay tuned for more.