Chicken Mummification

Seeing as how teaching has really been the only thing that I have been up to lately, I figured I would post about one of the things we did in my class recently.  In Ancient World History we were learning about the Ancient Egyptians, and you can't teach the Egyptians without covering mummies.  I wanted to do something that would stick with the students, something fun, and something they wouldn't forget...so I decided that we would actually mummify something!  It being frowned upon to bury one of my students (despite how tempting it may be) I had to come up with another option, and I decided on a chicken.  What is even cooler is that in Asia you can buy chickens from the grocery store with the heads and feet still on!!!  So in class we spent a week devoted to mummifying our chicken (I even had the kids name the chicken and write obituaries for it).  Another day the class made mummy masks using plaster gauze (used for casts by doctors) to mold the students faces, thanks to my roommate and a generous donation from his hospital.  That day was a little stressful as I was running around the room making sure the students could all still breathe and were not dying under my supervision, but it turned out well and the students had a lot of fun.  The mummification turned out to be a success, and the chickens are currently buried in our schools garden waiting to be dug up on an undetermined date (probably on a day when I have nothing planned and am at a loss of what else to do).  Here are some pictures from the class:

Student making a mummy mask 

Final product of the mummy masks 

 Our dead chicken

Post mummification 

This is how they were buried.  It was important to bury the mask with the mummy because this is supposedly how the spirit will recognize the body in the afterlife.