Or as my husband likes to call it, the undead chicken. My family has a weird sense of humor. But, in all seriousness, as I update this post 5 years later, this has made for one of our most memorable homeschool history lessons. When we cover Mystery of History 1 again, I plan to do a variation on this as a homeschool science lesson and test different mummification objects.
For the first two parts on how to mummify a chicken
Part 1 of How to Mummify a chicken
Part 2 of How to Mummify a chicken
How to Mummify a chicken, wrapping the chicken
So, this chicken has been sitting mummifying on my counter for about a month now. Actually, at the point I’m writing this, it’s now been sitting mummified for 2 weeks.
First, we started off with a very serious lecture about following directions and the serious consequences of not following, as in you don’t get to help anymore.
Then we took the chicken out of the salt/baking soda/baking powder mix, and started wiping it down. I pounded on it a bunch to get the mixture out of its’ cavity, and it took a lot of paper towels to get all of that off. Now usually I’ll use towels for messes, but this was one I didn’t want to be throwing in the wash with everything else. For some strange reason…..
Then we lightly brushed on oil that had some herbs soaking in it. They of course all had to take turns, but I’ll spare you pictures of each kid trying it out.
Afterwards we patted it dry again with a paper towel.
Then the kids quite happily tore up more paper towels and stuffed the cavity of the chicken while also putting in some spices (every time I see this picture of Princess, I’m reminded her hair looks like this because she tried to cut it herself). There were a few arguments about who got to put in what spices (which were basically the whole spices I’d gotten for a failed 5 senses experiment, my kids so were not going to be blindfolded).
Then they all got to take turns wrapping up the mummy. We individually wrapped each wing and leg, and I explained that with real mummies they wrapped each foot. The mummy was wrapped in (real sadness here) some of my favorite muslin fabric, oh the sacrifices I make for my kids. But, I figured that was better than cartoon character fabric…… The fabric was dipped in a solution of glue and water, the closest we were going to get to resin soaked fabric.
Then they settled in rather impatiently for it to dry after the horrible torture of cleaning up their work. TORTURE, I say.
And, finally I present to you, the CHICKEN MUMMY OF DOOM. That has been sitting on my counter for two weeks now, and I really don’t know what to do with it now. I hate to just throw it away, but at the same time I don’t want to keep it there forever. I’m sure if I put it outside I’ll collect an interesting assortment of vermin…….
And, if you don’t want to go through the whole process, here’s a few other options for learning about this:
All Things Beautiful (I just linked to her Ancient Egypt section, because it’s cool)
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