Grade 5 Visits the National Geographic Museum

Grade 5 students traveled to the National Geographic Museum to view the exhibit Beyond King Tut: The Immersive Experience. This trip prepared students to launch into their upcoming archeology unit in social studies. 

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the legendary discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, students experienced cinematic storytelling and soaring projection imagery as they ventured through the Boy King’s world. 3D models and photographs of artifacts discovered in King Tut’s tomb featured heavily in the exhibit, showing students how objects from the past provide us with windows into how other people lived. 

“We saw how they made the mummies in a video, and they told us about King Tut’s life and what he did, and how young he was. My favorite part had to be learning about how they weighed his heart with a feather to figure out if he could go into the afterlife,” says 5A student Caroline R. Her classmate Teddy W. added, “It was a very immersive experience. What was interesting to me was near the end, there was this part about Tutankhamun’s journey in the afterlife. There were 12 gates he had to go through, and each one was kind of a test.” 

This spring, Grade 5 students in each homeroom will take what they have learned about archeology and create artifacts and other evidence of a new society for another homeroom to excavate as part of an archeological dig.