Ancient History: Mesopotamia Study
Are you teaching ancient history in your homeschool? We are wrapping up our unit on Mesopotamia, and I have some thoughts. I recorded the video below to express my concerns about how our study is going. Particularly what is and isn’t working.
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What is working:
- museum visits (the Met has a set of Ancient Near East galleries with a fun family guide)
- hands on experiences, like making our own cuneiform tablets
- books with nice visuals, like the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History
- making puppets and pop up books with Evan Moore History Pockets
- using the font EasyCuneiform to make our own “code”
What isn’t working:
- too many facts, not enough narrative
- not enough child friendly stories for my son’s age group
- too much focus on great leaders, battles, and kings and not enough on what interests my kid
Other things mentioned in the video:
- How we studied prehistory
- Fimo clay – great for making cuneiform (use double pointed knitting needles or another stick with a flattened surface – NOT a toothpick or sharp pointed stick)
Using museums to study ancient history
Museums are a great resource for finding images – many now have catalogs online where you can search. You may even be able to see items from the permanent collection that aren’t on public view! This means that you can see artifacts that even the visiting public doesn’t get to see.
The Penn Museum is a fantastic resource for this topic. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what they have to offer, including a searchable database.
The Met, as I mentioned above, is our go-to resource in New York City. Even if you aren’t near NYC, they have great online resources as well.
Looking ahead…
As I discuss in the video, I’m going to be changing up our history curriculum for 2019. I’m just tweaking toooo much of History Odyssey to even say that we’re “using it”. And that’s OK!
I plan to start creating history units (and related science units – more on that in another post) and I have quite a list of topics already. But if there is a topic you’d like to see, please let me know!
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