Science Sunday: Chicken Mummy

I want to start off by thanking everyone for  all the kind comments last week.  October has been a rather crazy month, and I’ve been super stressed with all that’s been going on, so your comments were very much appreciated.

The completion of the Chicken Mummy!

Yes that does need boldness and hyperbole, because it feels like the end of an epic quest to get this done.  I also have to admit that every time I think of chicken mummy I think of this scene from Gamers 2 (fast forward to about 5:40 if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, and it is NOT child appropriate, PG-13 in some of the comments).

Yes, I have a weird sense of humor.

Supplies for the final chicken mummy steps:

the mummified chicken, WashableSchool Glue , water, Mixing Bowl , Table Salt , spices, Paper Towels , Cinnamon Sticks , linen strips, Meat Tenderizer {these are affiliate links to approximately what I got, I used a plastic bowl, but I think metal would work better because it washes better and doesn’t absorb stuff as much)

Step 5 Clean the chicken mummy off

  After you’ve pulled the mummy out of the bag wipe the salt combination off your chicken mummy.  My kids jumped the gun and washed it off under the sink, much to my great consternation.  It rather undid some of the mummification, you could see some of the chicken mummy’s skin become less dry.

There’s no video for this step because I was too busy trying to stop them drowning the poor chicken mummy.  I certainly can’t say my kids don’t have initiative.

Step 5a in the chicken mummy: smash those spices

This next step the kids thoroughly enjoyed because they got to use the meat tenderizer and attempt to pound the cinnamon sticks into smithereens.  Which we discovered was much harder than it looked.  We should have put protective goggles on because pieces were flying everywhere.

Step 5b mix the water and glue together to create a “resin” for the chicken mummy

To create a real mummy they would treat the linen strips with resin, but I don’t have that available, so we mixed together water and glue and called that resin (ours was a 50% mixture, in the scientific method of pour a bunch of this, and a bunch of that).

{Side note, my scientific measurement method could be why my recipes rarely turn out right, and that substituting thing…}

Step 6: Wrap the chicken mummy

As a side note my kids got a huge kick out of being addressed by their nicknames for the blog.  They thought it was quite fun to have secret identities, and call each other by the names.  Sorry about the video going in and out of focus, I decided to get this all done right before we left town to go to my grandma’s funeral, and so it was a bit of a rush job.

I showed the kids how to wrap the chicken and did some preliminary steps in wrapping it (the wings and made sure the opening was done, since we couldn’t close the body cavity back up).  Meanwhile the kids kept making comments about how gross it was, and how the thing smelled.

And that’s the last picture I have of our chicken mummy.  See, Jeff and I went up to my grandma’s funeral in Colorado and my kids stayed with 4 different people during that time.  On Saturday night they convinced my friend who was watching them “No Miss Tami, we’re all done with that project, it’s okay if we throw it away.  It smells and we don’t want it in the house anymore.”

So, Batman took it upon himself to throw it away.  In the meantime I got back Wednesday evening, tired and ready to take a picture of the completed and DRIED chicken mummy, only to search for it over an hour.

What we did wrong on our chicken mummy

I mentioned the kids said it smelled.  IN all honesty it did smell a little, not like a rotting decayed thing would have, but last time our chicken mummy didn’t really smell.  So, here’s my checklist for if we do this again:

1. Make sure the chicken mummy is completely covered with salt each time the salt “bath” is changed.  I think there were some times we didn’t have quite enough.
2. Change the salt dressing more often.  You are supposed to change the chicken mummy’s salt bath after 3 days or if it looks “clumpy.”  I don’t think we changed it often enough.
3. This one was out of my control, but don’t try and finish projects when packing for a trip.  Seriously my to do list for the day we left for Colorado was this:

Seriously, that’s the first thing I got done on my to do list.  Probably the second thing was put together a bag of stuff to do in the car (sewing projects, drawing stuff).  Then two of the bags behind, and a not-fully dried chicken mummy on my kitchen counter.

Poor Jeff, he puts up with so much.

Let’s see what others did this week:

Each week I’m spotlighting a few posts that were shared previously.  Many posts get linked up later in the week and they don’t always get as many clicks as they deserve, so I’m trying to spotlight a few every week.

This week, I’m gonna spotlight posts that I ended up pinning to my Things that Go Boom board.

First I want to bring up The Tiger Chronicle’s post about pumpkins.  She found several pumpkin experiments and then tried them out.  I especially loved the variations she did on elephant toothpaste, how to maximize the mess.

The Homeschool Scientist shared a reverse engineering worksheet for taking apart broken electronics.  I could also see using this with chemistry for figuring out why something worked.

Wingnuts and Watermelons shared a Skittles water density experiment.  If I hadn’t already eaten a large portion of the skittles this would be a great way to use them up.

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