Here is a video of how my children did the mummy and sarcophagus craft for their Ancient Egypt Unit Study:
Posts Tagged ‘history’
Mummy and Sarcophagus
Monday, October 4th, 2010Sarcophagus Craft
Friday, October 1st, 2010
This sarcophagus craft is a unique idea I had as I was brainstorming how to teach my children about mummies and sarcophagi. First I grabbed a small hinged box, drew the design in pencil, outlined it, and filled it in with metallic paint. I looked for simple hinged boxes that were long enough for the mummies that we were making. I found long boxes at Hobby Lobby for $1.99. Each child drew the design with pencil first. Three of my children took less than an hour for this step. My 10-year-old took probably two hours total to draw all the details on his sarcophagus.
The next day, we outlined the pencil sketch with a black Sharpie marker. It didn’t take nearly as long as sketching the drawing. Most of my kids took about 15 minutes to outline it.
The next day, we started to paint it with metallic paints. The kids painted each day for about a week. In total, it probably took two hours to paint. My oldest son took longer, because he thought about putting contrasting colors next to each other, and he just thought more about what he was doing.
When the paint was dry, we took the Sharpie marker and outlined everything again, since the paint had gone over it, and it looked slightly sloppy. Any bare wood was colored in by the Sharpie marker.
My 5-year-old daughter would happily paint for 15 minutes each day, and then she would be fatigued, because there was a lot of detail on her sarcophagus. (She drew it free hand by looking at a coloring book page, the same one she used for her papyrus picture.) When she was more than halfway finished painting her box, she said, “I’m done with my sarcophagus!” I thought about it for a minute, then I modified the project. I gave her metallic Sharpie markers to finish the sarcophagus. She was very happy with this alteration, because she could control the marker much better than the paintbrush. Older students should use the metallic paint, because it looks better than the metallic markers. But for a younger child, this is an easy way to modify the project in order to complete it.
Mummy Dolls
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
For our study of Ancient Egypt, we made some mummy dolls. This is how we did it.
My daughter’s doll house dolls were matted, so I upgraded her dolls. I decided to turn the old dolls into mummies. First we washed the doll with water and spices. We used cinnamon to represent the spices, and after doing research, I discovered that cinnamon was one of the spices used on mummies anyway. Second, we immersed the mummy in salt and spices. Third, we washed it with oil and spices. Lastly, we put on strips of linen. Actually, the strips were from an old bed sheet, and instead of sticky resin, we used white school glue mixed with little water.
The gluey mixture was very messy. If I had it to do over again, I would put wax paper under the whole project. (I didn’t want to put newspaper under it, because obviously the mummy would stick to the newspaper. But scrubbing the glue off the table wasn’t fun.)
It took two days for the mummies to dry. That is, except for Bryan’s. His mummy had so much oil on it that it seemed wet from the inside. Bryan decided to submerge it into salt, so that the salt would extract the moisture. (He learned that from our reading about mummies.) Sure enough, it worked. After only two days of sitting in the salt, the mummy was as dry as the Egyptian sand.
Egyptians Game
Saturday, September 25th, 2010
I picked up a game about Egypt called “Egyptians” at a yard sale for $1 last summer. I thought, sure, why not? I was about to teach a unit on Ancient Egypt in the fall. So now we’ve played the game several times, and the children have enjoyed it. The game is for two to four players, and the age is 7 and up. There is a game board, and the players are represented by camels. The object of the game is to collect six pharaohs and entomb them in your pyramid. Tomb robbers can steal from your pyramid, so you’re never really safe until you’ve won.
You answer questions about Ancient Egypt and collect pharaohs as you land on certain squares on the board. I was surprised a week ago by how many questions my children could answer after just two weeks of studying Egypt. (They must be reading Ancient Egypt books in their free time, because I didn’t teach them the answers to some of those questions. That’s one good thing about having fun books lying around. It makes kids want to study on their own.)
The most dramatic (and loudest) part of the game is when pharaohs do battle. One player puts down three pharaoh cards (for example) and another player puts down three pharaoh cards. Both players roll a die to see who rolls the highest number. The person with the highest number gets all six cards. My daughter acquired a huge pack of pharaoh cards by participating in a lot of battles. It was uncanny how she always won those battles.
When four people play the game, it can take two hours, which was tedious to me. My older two sons played the game (just the two of them) before I had a chance to look at it, and they said the game was way shorter with fewer people.
