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'.
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?
Please link up your Secular History Blog Posts here.We can begin to collectively share resources, activities and all of the fun we have studying history, with other secular homeschool bloggers.
This is a blog hop, so whilst it isn't compulsory feel free to grab the hop code (just below all of the links that have been added above) and place it into your Secular History Blog Post. By doing this all links added (including future links) will show in your post as well as here.
You just need to be sure you are linking up to the appropriately themed link list:
- For Ancient Mesopotamia themed posts click here.
- For Pre-History, Early Man and Evolutionary themed posts click here.
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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 :)
ReplyDeleteWow 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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteThat'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.
ReplyDeleteLooks 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! :)
ReplyDeleteWe 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!