Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Rest in "Peeces"

The chicks spent yesterday afternoon with Lydia, Benny and Sadie. Lydia hosted an Egyptian party for the kids. They mummified Barbies, made sarcophagi and ate Egyptian food. ( truthfully, from what I heard, Shira age Egyptian food and the others refused to try it. That's par for the course. Shira has yet to meet a vegetable that she doesn't like and Ben has yet to meet a dish of food for the first time without pronouncing that he doesn't eat it).

Shira ran upstairs when she returned to show me her mummy in its sarcophagus. She was very excited by the secret message she wrote that went under her mummy. It was in English and in Hieroglyphics and read, "Rest in Peeces".

I did a little gentle probing and discovered that since her experience with death is limited to what we've learned in The Story of the World , she truly thinks that when you say "Rest in Peace" you mean "rest in bits and pieces". She showed me the jars that contained her mummy's internal organs. Yup, mummies do rest in bits and pieces.

2 comments:

Lydia Netzer said...

They gave me a lot of laughs yesterday -- all of them. Such a pleasure working with such smart kids. Example: all I had to do was say "Hey, do you guys want to put some hieroglyphics in your burial chambers?" OH YES! YES! Then all I had to do was lay a few books open in the middle of the table and they were all busily hieroglyphicing away. Hehehe.

Shez said...

I too love how the merest suggestion has them scurrying. They love learning. We did a great activity a few months back where we made a papyrus scroll (with hieroglyphs) and a clay tablet with cuneiform. The kids first wrote their message in English and then translated it into the Egyptian and Babylonian.

The we pretended to be weather over centuries. We baked them, wet them, left them outside etc.. it was a great way to show the kids how well the clay stood up and how badly the papyrus fared.