Ancient Egypt 5th Week Activity

The grand finale for our Egypt unit at co-op was this morning. It was a lot of fun, but I think I can speak for all the teachers when I say I'm glad it's over, LOL. Above you can see 4 ancient Egyptians, come back in the flesh! Luke's tier painted these cool collars. The rest of the tiers colored ones made out of paper from Oriental Trading Co., but they were stiff and uncomfortable, so I came home with a bunch of them.

Here I am in the mummy room. I spoke for about 10 minutes, talking about the process of mummification. I welcomed the kids to our embalming shop and said I had heard they wanted to be my apprentices. I talked about the natron we used ("finest in all Egypt"!), and what the salt did to the body. I showed the mummified, but unwrapped, chicken that you can see me holding in the picture above. The kids were fairly impressed by the chicken, LOL. I let them all smell him, and many, especially the boys, also wanted to touch him. On the table behind me you can see some "canopic jars" that another lady made several years ago. Her kids are all grown out of TNT, so she let us borrow them. King Cluck's golden coffin is on the other side of me on the table.

After I talked, we let them practice their emblaming skills on bananas. They split the left side with a plastic knife, and then scooped out the innards with a plastic spoon. They placed the goop into their dixie cup "canopic jars". Then they taped the slit with white waterproof tape, and wrapped the banana with toilet paper strips. Above you can see Luke and Caleb McC with their finished products.

Nathan was my able assistant, and here you can see him standing with King Cluck in his golden coffin, ready for his journey to the next life. They are next to a mummy that we also borrowed from Joy, the one with the canopic jars. It was technically a Halloween decoration, with spooky green eyes, that you were supposed to put batteries in so that it would light up and make spooky sounds. We did not do this, LOL, and in fact, we re-wrapped him so that the eyes were covered up, and so that he looked more like a recently mummified body, as opposed to one stumbling out of a tomb 1500 years later. By the end of the time, his strips were sagging, however. He was an impressive ornament for our mummy shop!

Another mom was in the room with me, and she did yeoman's work, keeping up with the demand for toilet paper strips and pieces of tape! We had a lot of fun together! Neissy also did a wonderful job decorating the room with pictures, and even a huge poster of Isis that she drew and our kids colored! Her daughter, who is about the same age as Anna, was also a great helper, passing out cotton balls and toilet paper strips.

There were also 3 other rooms that the tiers rotated through. One of them was an excavation lab, so the kids could see what archeologists do. They had a great time brushing of artifacts they found in their gridded areas. Jonathan was excited to find hieroglyphics on a piece of pottery! Here he is with Pharaoh Daniel McC, who is sporting the double crown of unified Egypt, of course.

Another room was the food/music room. There the kids got to sample pomegranete seeds, dates, grapes, and flatbread. Then they learned the motions to "Pharaoh, Pharoah", that old camp classic, which they then sang.

The other room was a tomb room. One part of the room was darkened, lit with little lamps,a nd they talked about tombs and treasures. Then they heard the story of the discovery of King Tut's tomb, and they went through a little maze. There they saw the "treasure" that was left in the tomb, drew some hieroglyphics of their own on the "walls" of the tomb, saw Tut's sarcophagus, and played the Senet game which was left in the tomb. Pretty cool!

So all in all, it was a great day, and the kids had fun! I think they all learned alot about Ancient Egypt over the past 5 weeks, and I am sure they will remember a lot! I'm tired though, and so we're going out to Chik-Fil-A for dinner tonight! Yay for modern conveniences!