Friday, July 8, 2011

Way Back When: Ancient Mesopotamia - The Sumerians


During our study of Ancient Mesopotamia we built Lego Ziggurats.


We are using Pandia Press History Odyssey Ancients to guide us along on our journey. At this stage we are still with the free preview before we jump in and make a purchase. It certainly does make putting together a history unit easy, with lists of activities, supplemental books and mapping.

History Odyssey utilises The Story of the World as its' spine.


We also browse through the Kingfisher History Encylopedia for some facts and great pictorials.





We've mapped The Fertile Crescent, Sumer, The Mediterrean Sea. The Tigris, Euphrates and the Nile Rivers and spent time looking at modern maps of this area as it is today.


Evan Moors History Pockets are suggested as a go along for History Odyssey. These do offer hands on activities but are a lot of colouring, cutting and pasting. We are leaning towards labelling these as busy work here in our homeschool, but will give them a go for at least the next couple of units before making our final judgement on them.



The children quite enjoyed this activity, which showed that the Mesopotamians were the first people to use sailboats. Here they have cut a slot in the Tigris River and attached a popsicle stick on the back of their sail boat, so they can 'sail' it down the river.



We notebooked the definition for Cuneiform.



And read this Tale from Ancient Sumer - The City of Rainbows. This is a lengthy picture book, filled with names of times past and often the story was lost just trying to keep up with the names.



Another hands on activity, creating replica mosaics as used in story, The City of Rainbows. These Sumerians were supposed to be puppets but we chose to include them in the mosiacs. Both children really enjoyed this and spent a great deal of time getting their pices 'just so'.
If you are studying Ancient Egypt and the surrounding areas this is a great book with lots of ideas for various hands on crafty activities.


For Ancient Sumer, we chose the activity to build a model Ziggurat. In this picture the layer of paper mache is drying in the fresh air.









    Please link up below your Secular Mesopotamia themed posts.



    Do you teach Secular History in your Homeschool?

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    5 comments:

    Anonymous said...

    Thanks for sharing. We are using Pandia's Life Science at the moment and love it. I plan to use their ancient history next year so will be interested to see if you continue to enjoy it :)

    Sara said...

    Wow looks like so much fun. We did a bit of Lego today for our history lesson. We're just starting so haven't covered many topics yet. I bought two Evan-Moor books but haven't actually used it but it looks good. I think I might need something like SOTW as a guide.

    Natalie PlanetSmarty said...

    I am very interested in your secular history series - will check in occasionally to see what you are up to. I don't want daughter to lay her hands on SOTW - don't want her to get confused as for which parts are real history and which parts are Biblical stories.

    tlryder said...

    That's awesome. We did Lego ziggurats too, once upon a time. I'll definitely join the Secular History blog hop when we start regular "school" again.

    Sparklee said...

    Looks like a fun and interesting history unit! We were going to make sugar cube ziggurats a long time ago and we never got around to it! That's what I'll suggest next time my kids are bored! :)

    We do secular history, but we're on summer break at the moment. We started with SOTW a couple of years ago, but now we use lots of library books, History Pockets, DVD's, etc. I'm always interested to hear what others are doing for history!

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