This week the children had a choice between two crafts. Make a paper beetle or a “mummy” cat.
We talked about the importance of the beetle in Egyptian life, and how they were thought to be good luck. Beetle charms were sewn into a mummy’s wrappings to help the person reach the afterlife. Egyptians also believed the beetle had magical properties.
We used 6 inch paper plates for the body. Legs and pincers were pre-cut from black construction paper, as well as red “wings”. We used markers and colored pencils to decorate the body.
The second choice was to make a mummy cat. We learned about mummies and actually looked in books to see what real mummies looked like. To make our mummy cat, we used a brown paper lunch bag for the body, which we stuffed with newspaper. The bottom of the bag became the head, which we shaped into a rounded shape and cut out “ears” from the overlapping paper. We used brown masking tape (to represent mummy wrappings) for the body, scrunching the bag into the correct shape as we went along. The tail was made out of rolled up newspaper, taped with masking tape around the bottom part of the cat. We decorated the head with black marker, also decorating the body of the cat, making lines on masking tape to represent bandages. We finished our cat by drawing eyes, nose and whiskers on the face.
Most children were very interested in decorating their mummies, and went about playing with them after they were done; some holding them like babies or inventing a story about them.
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