Wellington Florida Homeschool- Making History Come Alive or Not So Alive!

Some of my favorite subjects to teach our son are history and geography. One of the perks is that you get to choose your own curriculum. Because we have homeschooled 6 children it is much easier this time around. We use a biblical time-line and teach history from a biblical perspective which is much different than my secular education in Germany and in Stanford Elementary.

One of our neighbors also homeschools her children and it just so happens that our son is about a year younger than one of her sons. Needless to say; they are very good friends and we do a lot of coop teaching.

We are learning about Ancient Egypt right now. With the internet and the public library there is no lacking in materials and references about Ancient Egypt. In fact, there is TOO much- most parents get information overload. So we do unit studies with full immersion into a subject. So when we study Ancient Egypt we spend two hours a day on this area. We incorporate music, math, science, art, language art, reading, history and geography.

Part of our hands on learning section was science and art combined. The two boys mummified chickens. They each got their own chicken. The Museum of England has really good instructions and lesson plans.

We found out that in Ancient Egypt most people mummified their loved ones. The difference was in how fancy of a funeral you could afford. The poor people just placed their loved ones in the sand in the desert. The salt in the sand mummified them perfectly. We had to buy a lot of salt for this experiment.

Oooh! We also found out why you use all those spices! To cover up the smell of decay! We realized that such a small animal as a chicken smells pretty bad as it is drying out. You can only imagine how bad the humans smelled!

The museum instructions said the initial drying out process would take about 4 to 6 weeks. Every week the boys would have to take the salt off their chickens, re-spice them really good with cloves and Cinnamon and then salt them again. They wore plastic gloves since we did not want to get those germs on us!

What we failed to realize is that we live in Florida and it is very humid here. The drying out process took 8 weeks!
The boys were very patient.

Finally they wrapped their dried out chickens with glue ( to substitute for the resin) and gauze. The cashier at Target was looking as us strange when we bought so many rolls of gauze- we explained that we were making chicken mummies,LOL! 

Now the chickens were given an Ancient Egyptian funeral, placed in 'Gold' coffins they made from shoe boxes and then buried in our back yard. In one year they will dig them up and check them out!