Ancient Egypt Death Mask Craft

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Ours was truly wonderful. I love Thanksgiving because its a time to focus on family and the best part is the dinnertime conversation about what we are thankful for. The kids have such precious things on their minds! Anyway, we’re back to school now—and we’re finishing up some pretty fun projects.

We had stepped away from our Ancient Egypt unit for several weeks while we finished up our chemistry unit and focused on German. Last week we continued on with our unit, making this really catchy, but simple, Egyptian death mask.

Ever since I saw this project done by our friend’s first grader a few years ago, I knew it was something we should try to fit in when the time was right. I didn’t have any pictures of B’s project, in fact I think they may have made their masks in their art class from plaster-of-paris. This is what we came up with. I bought a pack of ‘design your own’ face masks from Oriental Trading. Then we cut out a cardboard plate for the back of the mask. You need big boxes; we used a car seat box.

We took the pieces outside and spray painted them with gold spray paint.

We glued the face mask to the cardboard backing. Then before decorating our masks, we looked carefully at King Tut’s death mask and looked (admired) at Grandma and Grandpa’s pictures from their trip to the Middle East. Now wouldn’t *that* be the best way to study Egypt?! Grandpa took this photo…

Anyway, the kids made the snakes for the top of the mask and then got out the paints and started working on their masks.

And here’s their final product. Didn’t they turn out well? The kids were really excited about these. I love the eyes on LD’s mask. The others have holes in the back so they can see through when they hold them up to their faces.

More on Ancient Egypt:

If you are studying Ancient Egypt, you might also be interested in our other activities like

Creating the Nile River Valley

and the activities we did when we learned about the Ancient Egyptian myths. I made some  Ancient Egyptian Gods and Goddesses worksheets (free to download) and you’ll find more about them at that link.

Canopic Jar Project:

We continued working on our canopic jar project. Canopic jars are the jars where ancient Egyptians placed the lungs, liver, intestines, and stomach of the deceased during the mummification process. The previous week we had covered a water bottle with paper mache. When the was dry a few days later, we formed the heads of our jars. Today we’re ready to decorate our jars.

DD’s ancient Egyptian canopic jar was not dry, so she put hieroglyphics on the jar I made. LD and ED painted their jars.

While they worked on their ancient Egyptian canopic jars, I read our Cleopatra VII: Daughter of the Nile  (affiliate link) novel (which occurred 1,000 years AFTER the middle kingdom when King Tut lived and when many mummies were preserved!). A couple days earlier we finished watching the famous Cleopatra movie with Elizabeth Taylor. The kids loved, loved it!

We talked about Nefertiti again (because she was mentioned in our Cleopatra novel).

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links in this post are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase.

See you again soon here or over at our Homeschool Den Facebook Page. Don’t forget to Subscribe to our Homeschool Den Newsletter! ~Liesl