A Fun Project for Social Studies

One of the best things that I have gotten to do this semester is teach Social Studies. I absolutely love history. At the beginning of the semester, I was privileged to teach a unit on Ancient Rome and Israel. This was a lot of fun. For this quarter, my kids are studying Ancient Egypt. I found the neatest project for them to do. It is called SimMummies. Over the course of five weeks, the students get to make a pharaoh out of an apple and an orange and mummify it. Our class has done all of the different steps. We had a mummification day, and prepared our pharaohs for drying in natron. Natron is made from equal parts of baking soda and salt. Then over the last four weeks, while the pharaohs were drying, the students have made amulets, shabtis, coffins, and canopic jars from clay and paper mache. We had a day for wrapping the dried pharaohs in linen cloths and coating them with resin (glue). The students also learned to read and write in hieroglyphs for creating cartouches for their pharaohs. In addition, the students got to make death masks for their pharaohs and books of the dead and senet boards to put in their pharaoh's tomb. The finished project is put into a tomb that the students build out of shoeboxes and decorate. Next week, we will be having a funeral with food, music, and games, all done in the ancient Egyptian style.