Sixth grade students have been studying Ancient Mesopotamia in Mr. Moran's Social Studies class. In Art & Enrichment, we have been exploring the question, "How do humans communicate through writing?". We began by looking at cuneiform writing. With the help of the University of Pennsylvania Museum website, students roughly translated their names into cuneiform. They then wrote as a Babylonian scribe would have written; into a clay tablet with a reed-like stylus.
We later went on to create individualized pictographs. Just as an abstracted barley plant became a basis for cuneiform, students abstracted drawings of their ideas they wanted to communicate. These abstracted symbols became a coded pictograph that fellow students could try to decipher.
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