I am very familiar with the Sumerians, having studied them in-depth with my older children during our Mesopotamia Unit Study. It was interesting all those years ago and I was looking forward to digging in this time. An extremely advanced people, the Sumerians built cities, created the sexagesimal counting system as well as the very first complex writing system called cuneiform. This was going to be fun!
Reading about the Sumerians
Of course, the first thing I did was read the lesson from the Mystery of History text-book. I then read the follow books about the focal topics I had chosen. Fortunately, I had these from our Mesopotamia unit study, so I did not have to spend a penny!
Also, I reread the following two fiction books, which we had all read before. In fact, we had done a fairly decent study on The Golden Bull. Although, the little two had no recollection of this 🙂
Written Work for the Sumerians
I created some note pages to go with this lesson, which the girls loved. Especially, because there was only a small space to write 🙂 I think B7 literally shudders when she sees me armed with a wad of note pages with lots of lines on them!
These were perfect, however, and the girls created some wonderful note pages. The first was some notes about the fertile crescent:
And, the second was all about Leonard Wooley’s excavations at Ur (this is where we obtain most of our information about the Sumerians):
Sumerians: Art
We read a little together on the types of Sumerian art. I had saved some clay for just this time, and the girls excitedly gathered together all Lillie’s polymer clay tools and created some Sumerian art of their own:
This is A9’s:
and this is B7’s (she is showing early artistic tendencies):
The girls created a note page and stuck in their work of art:
(Note pages available as a free download at the end of the post)
Sumerians: Cuneiform
We had learnt about this before, but as we had some clay left over from the sculptures, the girls attempted their own Sumerian writing:
Here is A9’s:
and here is B7’s:
Again, they created some note pages and stuck in their own cuneiform. A9’s:
B7’s:
Sumerians: The Ziggurats
The girls learnt all about the temples of ancient Ur, wrote a few words about them, and made some bricks out of the left over clay:
They left these to dry over night. The next morning they worked together to create their very own mini ziggurat, using copious amounts of glue and some card to stabilise it:
They stuck a picture of their creation into the note page I made for just this job. Here is A9’s:
And here is B7’s:
This was a seriously good study! If you would like to download any of these note pages for use with your own work, just click on the link below (please reference me if you blog about it….thank you 🙂 )
Do follow along our Mystery of History adventures:
The pages look very neat and orderly with their projects and writing.
This is really the perfect timing since we’re studying Ancient history next year, it’s getting me so excited for this.
I remember doing some of these activities last time we studied ancient history.