History this week...

And I am so mad I forgot to take pictures! We are still on ancient Egypt in Story of the World. We're taking it slow and I find no need to hurry through it. Egypt is interesting to Trevor and I both. We've hit the section on mummies and so have checked out many books from the library on Egyptian beliefs of the afterlife, the mummification process and pyramids. And.. believe it or not, one of the "optional activities" in the SOTW book is actually making a mummy! No, not a paper mummy. No, we're not going to wrap a doll in linen. Yes, a real mummy.

So today we took our victim, a small chicken from the grocery store, throughly washed him in water and then in wine, patted him dry and doused him with a salt mixture of salt, baking soda and baking powder. He is currently sitting on my kitchen counter in a couple plastic bags (we read the Egyptians used as much as 500 lbs of salt to cover the body in during the drying process- we used on big box of table salt. heh). The whole process took 70 days for a human body and will take about a month for our chicken. The first week requires checking it every day, drying out moisture and repacking it. After a week, we're supposed to leave him alone for a week. Hopefully this will not turn out to be a stinky experiment. During the second process where we use oil on the chicken, we'll rub some spices in, too, like the Egyptians would have. However, we will not be building a pryamid, nor will we be burying him with toys for the afterlife. I think we might bury him. I haven't decided.. we have about a month to think about that.

So the kids had fun with that. Tomorrow we review Chemistry and will do our experiment on Friday. So lots of hands on stuff this week!