Year 4 Get Creative With Ancient Egyptian Mummification

At the start of the Spring Term, Year 4 began investigating the Ancient Egyptians. Together, we created a class map of questions and facts that we would like to have achieved by the end of the term.

One of which was, of course, all about mummification. Therefore, Year 4 conducted their very own mummification (don’t worry, it was just a tomato).

This is what we did to achieve the mummification process:

1. We observed our dead ‘body’ (tomato) and drew a picture to show what it looks like before the mummification process.
2. Carefully, we made a small incision to the top of the tomato using a knife and scooped out the seeds. This would have been the Ancient Egyptians removing all of the organs from the dead bodies. We threw this away, although the Egyptians will have placed the organs in Canopic jars.
3. We washed the dead body (tomato) inside and out with ‘alcohol’ (antibacterial hand wash). This will kill any of those nasty germs.
4. We weighed our mummies. This is called the pre-mummification process.
5. We filled the mummy with a special salt called Natron. We made this by using an equal mix of table salt and bicarbonate of soda.

We are now going to wait to see what happens to our dead bodies (or tomatoes).

We had a lot of fun making our mummies and it helped us to achieve the answers to one of the questions from the start of term.

See some photos of our mummification here.