How to Mummify a chicken, Science Sunday

 

I’m starting a series of posts on how to mummify a chicken, and going through with the science behind this.  Today, we’re going to cover the first 3 steps in our:

 

Supplies to mummify a chicken

Supplies needed: cornish game hen (you can use another, but a smaller size is helpful during this time), salt, baking soda, gallon size ziploc bag (theoretically you can just use a bowl or something, but I like being able to throw away what we used)

 

Step 1: wash the chicken before mummifying the chicken

 

I’ve been enjoying creating videos of the kids as they tell me steps because it lets me have an audio and video record of their abilities.

This showed mastery of two things:

1.  types of joints the chicken has as they moved the chickens wings and legs around

2.  why were we washing the chicken as part of mummifying a chicken

Also the kids love to ham it up for the camera.  It kind of cracks me up.

 

Step 2 to mummify a chicken: drying it off

This step my goal was to realize the difference between how we were mummifying a chicken, and how the Ancient Egyptians would mummify a person.  They didn’t have access to paper towels or easily discardable materials (spell check says that isn’t a word).  They’d be using cloth.  I wasn’t willing to sacrifice/use my cloth for this, so paper towels it was.

At this point the kids still thought this was fun.  They got a big kick out of drying off the chicken to get it ready for the next step in mummifying a chicken.

 

Step 3 in how to mummify a chicken: mix the baking soda and salt

I almost forgot to include this step in how to mummify a chicken.  Get a large mixing bowl and mix roughly equal parts of baking soda and salt.  You can mummify with just salt, but the baking soda aids in the mummication.

 

Step 4 in mummifying a chicken: pack it with salt

 

This was the step the kids started to get squeamish on, as you can tell from Princess’ comments.

This is also one of the most important steps to get right.  You need to pack the inside of the chicken pretty solidly with salt, and you need to make sure the chicken is completely covered in the salt mixture as you start to mummify the chicken.

 

The science behind mummification

Salt is a natural drying agent, a desiccant.  Baking soda is also a desiccant.  The bacteria that causes things to decompose needs the liquids that are naturally in the body to cause decomposition.  The salt/baking soda mixture will draw out the moisture and prevent decay.

 

More on Mummification

How Stuff Works: how mummies work

How to mummify an apple

How to mummify action man

Hands on Mummies

To get more ideas on Ancient history check out my Creation to Christ pinterest board.

Come back next week to see the next steps in how to mummify a chicken

 

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.

Finding the Teachable Moments shared the benefits of cooking with kids, and made some delicious applesauce.

Afterschooling for Smarty Pants shared a great engineering challenge: build a boat that can hold a toy.  My kids would love this challenge.

 

 

 

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Now link up your SCIENCE posts for the week, and then visit some of the other posts linked up and say hi. I’m going to be pinning, commenting, FBing or tweeting all of the posts linked up as the week goes by.