Magic Tree House Mummies In The Morning

Using Mummies In The Morning as a Classroom Teaching Tool

Magic Tree House Mummies In The Morning is the eighth book in Mary Pope Osborne's series, and it's one of the more useful ones for elementary teachers because it hits three subjects at once: ancient Egypt, geography, and basic cause-and-effect plotting. The book itself is short, roughly 3,500 to 4,000 words, and follows Jack and Annie as they travel to Egypt during the time of the pharaohs. That brevity is why it works in a classroom. You can read it in one sitting and still have time for the activities that follow. The book is in print continuously. You can get a hardcover from any major bookseller, the paperback is widely available, and the Audible audio version runs about 40 minutes. There are also free reading passages on the official Magic Tree House website and on sites like ReadWorks that align the text with comprehension questions. I've used both the physical book and the ReadWorks version in my own lessons. The ReadWorks free passages work fine for quick in-class reading, but the physical book gives you the illustrations and the map at the back, which matters for the geography activities. Jack and Annie land in ancient Egypt near the time of the pyramids. They encounter a mummy-making process, a pharaoh, and some tombs. The factual content is simplified but generally accurate for the reading level. It includes references to hieroglyphs, the Nile, sarcophagi, and the general idea of mummification. The plot is straightforward: the kids get into a minor predicament, solve it with help from an Egyptian character, and return home. Nothing stays dead here.

What most people miss about this book is how deliberately structured it is for informational cross-referencing. Each Magic Tree House book comes with a Facts About book at the end. The one for Mummies in the Morning has roughly a dozen pages of supplementary content that expands on mummification steps, the role of embalmers, the Canopic jars, and the journey of the soul according to ancient Egyptian belief. That second section is where the real teaching value sits. The narrative draws the kids in. The facts section does the learning.

A practical lesson structure that works

I run this as a three-session unit. Session one is read-aloud plus a vocabulary hit. Session two is the facts section with a guided activity. Session three is the output task. Here is exactly how each session breaks down. Session one takes about 30 minutes. Read the main book aloud, pausing after chapter two to check that students can track where Jack and Annie are geographically. Pull out a blank map of North Africa and have them place the Nile, the pyramids of Giza, and the desert border. Stop reading if you hit a word like embalmer, sarcophagus, or hieroglyph and write them on the board with a working definition. Do not turn this into a full etymology lecture. One sentence per word is enough at this stage. Session two is where you use the facts section. I have students work in pairs for 20 minutes on a mummification sequencing worksheet. They number the steps from first to last using only the book's factual content. The typical order they arrive at is: washing the body, removing internal organs, drying with natron, wrapping, placing the tomb. If a pair gets stuck on step two, they usually need the diagram in the facts section more than my explanation. Let them look at the illustration first.

Session three is the output. I have them write a short diary entry from the perspective of either Jack or an Egyptian apprentice embalmers. Five to eight sentences. I require at least three vocabulary words from session one. This takes most students about 15 minutes. The rest of the period goes to sharing and a quick whole-class discussion about what the book got right and what it left out.

Common pitfalls and how I handle them

The biggest issue I run into is that some students treat the narrative section as fiction and the facts section as optional. They skip the facts section entirely and then ask me questions I already answered in there. I make it a classroom rule that the Facts About book counts as part of the reading grade, not extra credit. That shifts their behavior noticeably. Another problem is over-relying on the book for factual accuracy. The narrative compresses events and simplifies mummification into a quick sequence. If a student asks whether the heart was actually removed during mummification, the book will mislead them because it glosses over that detail. The heart was typically left in place. The brain was removed through the nose, but the intestines, lungs, liver, and stomach went into the Canopic jars. I flag this discrepancy during session two and have students note it in the margin. It turns a minor inaccuracy into a teachable moment about primary source verification. I also encountered a specific issue last year when using the ReadWorks free passage version with a group of third graders. The passage was truncated before the mummification details, which meant the sequencing activity fell apart because the kids had no reference for steps three through six. I resolved it by printing the Facts About pages from a library copy of the book and handing those out instead. If you are using an online excerpt, always verify that it includes the mummification content before assigning the sequencing worksheet.

What this approach does not do well

This unit will not give students a deep understanding of ancient Egyptian religion. The book touches on the afterlife, the weighing of the heart, and the gods Anubis and Osiris, but it does not explore the theology in any detail. If your curriculum requires coverage of Egyptian cosmology, you will need to supplement with a video or a more detailed nonfiction text. Scholastic News Kids Post has decent articles on mummification that pair well here. The unit also assumes access to the Facts About section. Some classroom editions are worn out, and the library copies sometimes have the facts section missing or dog-eared beyond readability. Keep a backup copy or a printed PDF of those pages on hand. It saves twenty minutes of frustration when the only available copy has the last twelve pages torn out.

Quick resource list

The book itself is available through Scholastic, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local library. The official Magic Tree House website at magictrethouse.com has free lesson plans and the facts sections posted. ReadWorks has free reading passages with comprehension questions. For the mummification sequencing worksheet, I created my own and keep a master copy at home rather than redistributing it, but you can find similar templates by searching for Magic Tree House Mummies in the Morning worksheet on teacher resource sites. If you are running this with fourth graders, I would stretch the unit to four sessions and add a simple hieroglyph nameplate activity where they write their first name using the alphabet chart included in the facts section. Third graders finish the three-session version comfortably. Fifth graders will finish it in two sessions unless you add the supplementary reading requirement, in which case three sessions is appropriate again.