Ancient Mesopotamia Lesson Plans

Mesopotamia, meaning “between the rivers,” was the cradle of civilization. Explore the people who lived here thousands of years ago with a couple of our favorite Mesopotamia lesson plans. These two lessons are designed to give a sense of time and place for ancient Mesopotamia, while integrating critical thinking, math, and social studies goals.

Books for this study:

• DK Eyewitness Books: Mesopotamia
• Gilgamesh the King
• You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Sumerian Slave!: A Life of Hard Labor You’d Rather Avoid

Online resources:

• The British Museum has an interactive site with extensive basic information and images.
• University of Chicago‘s interactive site
• Mr. Donn’s Mesopotamia
• Discover Babylon game
• LookLex timeline

Economics: Needs and Opportunities

The area called Mesopotamia is a stretch of land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers:

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Have students identify this area on modern maps and list the nations that currently exist in this area.

In 3100 BC, when people in Mesopotamia began writing, people had already lived there for a long time. The Sumerians lived there some 7500 years ago, and the Assyrians, Babylonians, and ancient Persians were among the other civilizations that made this part of the world their home. The region became part of the Roman Empire in 114 or so. Later the Ottoman Turks controlled the area, and it has been part of Iraq since 1932.

It was a good place to live all that time because it allowed people to meet their basic needs. Try our Cookie Geography lesson to make this point. Have students cut the shape of your state from gingerbread (there’s a recipe at the link), use icing to show the rivers or other bodies of water, and add chocolate chips to show the major cities. You’ll find that the oldest, largest cities are nearly always on the water, and usually on a river. Discuss the ways in which rivers satisfy basic human needs for food, water, and transportation. Then look at the map of Mesopotamia and note how the rivers made it a good place to live.

Older students can research the weather in the area. They’ll find that there was regular rainfall and predictable growing seasons, a set of circumstances which encouraged agriculture. While hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants will produce enough food to sustain life, agriculture is a more reliable and efficient way to produce food.

Propose this as a hypothesis and have students figure out how they can support or reject it. For example, they might compare the amount of food produced by wild plants with the amount produced by cultivated plants. They might calculate the amount of time searching for 1,000 calories of wild foods would take, compared with the amount of time required to produce 1,000 calories of food from a garden. They could estimate the amount of fish or game an individual with simple tools such as a spear or net could bring home in a day, compared with the amount of food a day’s farming could produce.

Once students are convinced that agriculture is an efficient means of satisfying people’s need for food, point out that the rise of agriculture allowed specialization. If all the people have to spend most of their time coming up with food, they won’t have the leisure to develop other special talents. If fewer people can be farmers and produce enough food for all, then some people can work on pottery, metalcrafting, and even just coming up with ideas for useful things like ships and calendars.

This is what happened in Mesopotamia. With enough leisure to specialize, people came up with writing, laws, new forms of transportation, government, and other technologies. The rivers allowed trade with other growing civilizations, bringing new goods and also new ideas to the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians who lived there.

Have students use resources like Material World: A Global Family Portrait to identify nations or areas where much of people’s attention has to be devoted to basic survival. Compare the level of specialization in careers in these places with that in more affluent nations. Use this information to develop context for a discussion about how the natural resources and climate of Mesopotamia influenced the history of the societies there. The resources linked above will provide background information.

Play Civilization or any other history simulation game and discuss how the game’s creators have tried to replicate the effects of differing access to resources.

Alternatively, have students use Google Earth with cities and building layers turned off to identify good places for building a civilization. They could imagine that they are beings from another planet coming to what they think is an uninhabited earth and choosing a likely spot to form a colony. Have students create a Google Earth Tour to show the places they recommend to their commander back on their home planet.

Calendars

Mesopotamia is the home of mathematics. People began to count, using their fingers and thus coming up with a base 10 system of arithmetic. They also developed a calendar. At first, they divided their years by agricultural events, deciding that a new year would begin with the barley harvest in what we would now call May and June. Events like the time to plant could be identified as a fairly regular and predictable time. This led to the development of the 360 day year.

360 is a tidy number that can be divided in many ways. We still divide a circle into 360 degrees, and Math Forum has an interesting discussion of this fact which includes Mesopotamia’s relationship to it. Have students draw or cut big circles and divide them into 360 days– and they’ll notice a striking resemblance to an analog clock, which has 60 minutes, each with 60 seconds.

360 divided by 12 gives 30, roughly the number of days in a month measured by the changes of the moon. And it takes just about 360 days for the earth to circle the sun, so it seemed to be a pretty good length of time for a year.

It’s not perfect, though. After some years of using this base 60 calendar, people would find that the harvests weren’t falling at “harvest time” any more. Various lunar and solar calendars were used in different places, and then the Julian calendar became popular in much of the world. It has largely been replaced by the Gregorian calendar, which has been in use in the United States since September of 1752.

Students can find a lot of detail about various calendars at Calendar FAQ.

There is a new proposed calendar called the Hanke-Henry Calendar which would have 30 days in each month and then have an extra week every few years.

Divide students into groups and assign each one a particular calendar from the links above. Have each group prepare a timeline showing an overview of the history of Mesopotamia using their assigned calendar. Compare the various timelines.

Finish up by determining how a change of calendar might affect your lives. For example, the new Hanke-Henry calendar would put an end to Hallowe’en as we know it, and what would we do with the extra week in 2015?

Add all the Mesopotamian information you’ve discovered to your classroom timeline and map.

Civilization: the Board Game

Civilization: The Board Game is a complex strategy game chronicling the rise (and fall) of civilizations. At home or with friends, you’ll find that hours pass swiftly as great cities are built and destroyed, new technologies are discovered and shared, and alliances develop and change.

In the classroom, you can easily stretch the game out over a week or two, comparing the events of the game with actual history and geography and considering how the flow of history is smoothed, interrupted, or changed by events and choices.

There are four ways to win this game, which is another way of saying that there are four metrics for civilization:

• War: a player who takes another’s capital city wins the game. Players have many opportunities tthroughout the game to strengthen their defenses and also to adopt strategic positions for aggression. It was interesting to us to see how, once one player has shown an intention to win in this way, other players begin diverting resources from other goals to strengthening their military powers.
• Economy: a player who amasses 15 gold coins wins the game. While 15 coins doesn’t sound like much, players are more likely to gain wealth in the form of natural resources, labor, or property than in the form of gold. Focusing on gold  means giving up many other opportunities.
• Culture: players may choose to move their pieces along a path in the marketplace that leads to a cultural victory. The first gains are fairly easy, as a player can devote a city to the arts and receive a Culture Card giving special privileges and powers, but the price of cultural accomplishment increases as the game continues.
• Technology: a player who builds a pyramid of technology cards culminating in space travel wins. All players work for technology, which must be paid for in labor and trade — or gained through espionage and alliances. Decisions about which technology to choose and how much to invest in technology affect players’ outcomes.

The players in the game are China, Egypt, Rome, Russia, Germany, and America. Each starts with certain advantages; for example, China begins with writing and gains extra culture points during exploration. However, players don’t have to follow the actual course of history. Players can choose their form of government and their path toward the hoped-for win.

The map is different every time, and it is gradually discovered. Natural resources and land forms affect the course of the game, and natural disasters (or those caused by humans) can change the course of history. There are also great people and great accomplishments which can be gained either by chance or through hard work and investment.

Each round in the game is played in five stages:

• Start of turn: players can build cities, change their government, and take advantage of special opportunities they’ve earned. Often, especially at the beginning of the game, every player must pass during this stage.
• Trade: players collect the trade produced by their cities, which they will use later in the game to gain technologies or for other priorities. Both luck and strategy can lead to increased or decreased production of trade. Players also trade with one another during this stage.
• City management: players build things like libraries, marketplaces or barracks, build up armies and artilleries, and take part in the cultural life of their nation. This requires production points, some of which are gained by luck and others of which are strategically developed.
• Movement: players take part in exploration and conquest. Activities in this stage range from scouting for resources to attacking other nations.
• Research: players use their resources to gain new technologies.

In the classroom, this can be one day of play, and the class (playing in teams) can stop at this point and debrief, discussing the events that took place and the decisions that were made, and how they affected the players. For example, the discovery of irrigation allows a player to build an additional city. Discuss how irrigation developed in the real world, and how it allowed civilizations to expand away from rivers and to feed more people.

At home, it’s possible to stop in between rounds of play, but we never want to. This is a very fun, social game. We’d use Twitter on the classroom projector and allow players to text within their teams as well as using their smartphones to tweet publicly about the course of the game as it takes place. For younger students or classes in which most students don’t have the technology or its use is forbidden, teams can gather and discuss their moves, sending an envoy to make each move.

We found that it was hard to get the game started. There’s a magazine of instructions, and you have to read and understand them fully before you can begin your first game. This is probably more natural in the classroom, where it will bring up many thought-provoking questions. Here’s how the first round is likely to go:

• Start of turn: each civilization builds a city, and places an army and a scout in the outskirts of the city.
• Trade: each city collects the initial trade points on the board around its city.
• City management: depending on the amount of production the city begins with, players may be able to build public buildings or to strengthen their military.
• Movement: players move their scouts out in search of resources and places to build additional cities. They can only move slowly at first, until the civilization develops better technologies for travel. As civilizations move, they uncover more of the map.
• Research: some players will have enough trade points to gain new technologies, while some will have to wait for another round of trade.

Here the Russians have developed their pyramid of technology cards to the point of being poised to add space travel. Their city has been built up to encourage trade and productivity to pay for the expensive technology.

Here the Americans are working toward a Culture win. The small orange figures of their scouts and armies are not even on the board, and they’ve built their cities with Great People to gain culture points.

The combination of fun and teachable moments makes this an excellent educational game, but it’s also very enjoyable as a strategy and critical thinking game. Set it up in the corner of your classroom and let fast finishers spend a few minutes in play, or take it home and have fun with your friends.

Classification

We’ve illustrated key concepts about classification with a nice assortment of noodles.

Pasta Lesson Plans

Use your noodle! Pasta is a fun way to study geography, math, and history. We have ideas and activities for all grades!

Pasta is a food made from flour, water, and often eggs and flavorings. It can be cooked and eaten immediately, or dried for long storage. It is boiled, rather than baked or fried as bread is. Pasta and bread have much in common, but the ability to store pasta has made it a good option for seafaring or nomadic people.

Start off your study with Everybody Brings Noodles , a fun picture book about a block party to which all the neighbors bring noodles showing their ethnic heritage. The book includes recipes for everything from Italian pasta with pesto to noodle kugel. Older students enjoy being read to, and it’s a quick way to introduce the topic and concept.

Then try out some of our cross curricular activities:

Math

• For your youngest students, fill the Sand Table with noodles, bring in lots of measuring tools, and get plenty of practice with measurement.
• Sort pasta by shape, color, size, or national origin. In fact, pasta is so varied that it makes the perfect example for sorting and thinking about the physical characteristics of objects. Enjoy our PowerPoint on classification using noodles. You can download it for your own use by clicking on the title below, or watch it at YouTube.

Use Your Noodle!

• Use the recipes from Everybody Brings Noodles ,or have students bring their favorite pasta recipes from home, and do some math work. Double or halve recipes, measure out the ingredients to create a mise en place, or even actually cook some noodles. There’s a lot of math in cooking. If you’re ambitious, bring in a Pasta Machine and make your own pasta.
• There are said to be about 350 different shapes of pasta in Italy alone. Make it a class project to find as many different shapes of noodles as you can. You can make a Pinterest board of photos, a bulletin board of glued-on noodles, or a service project collecting packages of pasta for your local food bank. As you collect, take time to count, sort, graph, and generally use the noodles for math manipulatives.
• Get advanced with the geometry of pasta. Enjoy a slideshow from George Legendre’s Pasta by Design. Examine the images in the slideshow or the book as examples of three dimensional forms.

Art

• If you’ve never once used macaroni to make collage pictures for your classroom, you should do it now. The more shapes and colors you have available, the more versatility the project will have. This pasta self-portrait is one of our favorite examples.

• Admire an Amazing Pasta Animation from The Geometry of Pasta that uses geometry, typography, and music in innovative ways. Challenge students to use letters and simple shapes to create their own images.
• A simpler project is to have students create a quote from alphabet noodles, using other pasta to add punctuation and perhaps decorate their quotation. We’ve heard from teachers who make centers with a box of alphabet noodles and macaroni and let students use them throughout the year to practice spelling and punctuations.
• Photographer Renato Marcialis has made a name for himself with his pasta photos. Click on his name to see his portfolio. Challenge students to create their own great pasta photos. Use them for a Pinterest board (see the math idea above for the link) or for a great bulletin board display. Read our Kids’ Photo Tips and make this the start of a great lesson on the art of photography. One of Marcialis’s best know works is this map of Italy made of noodles:

Social Studies

• We made our pasta map of Italy (at the beginning of the post) with Google Earth. You can also make a pasta map of the world. Use Google Earth or Google Maps and give students practice with tech tools they’ll actually use in later life, or make an art project of it. The noodle map of Italy above is one way to do it, but a hand-drawn map with drawings of the various kinds of pasta  the world has to offer would be a lot of fun, too.
• There are a lot of different claims about who first made pasta and how the idea traveled from one part of the world to another. China, Greece, and the Arab world are among the many places that have been given credit for coming up with the idea first. However, there are some ideas that are just such good ideas that they come up repeatedly all over the world. The atlatl, weaving, and agriculture are all examples of such ideas; maybe pasta is, too. Pasta is much like bread or porridge in its ingredients, but it can be stored and transported much more easily. Anything that lets people store food for the future increases the flexibility and freedom of the people who have that invention.  Challenge students to research and compare the various claims to the first pasta.
• Some say that Marco Polo brought pasta from Asia to Italy. Learn more about Marco Polo:

• The Travels of Marco Polo Lit Trip will show you the places Marco Polo wrote about in his book, now known as The Travels of Marco Polo.
• You can also read it online at Google Books.
• Marco Polo by Demi is a beautifully illustrated book giving basic information about the life and times of Marco Polo. Read it aloud to younger students — or to older ones to make sure everyone has that basic background.
• Adventures of Marco Polo by Russell Freedman looks at one of the big questions: did Marco Polo lie about his travels? This is a well written and engaging book that goes into much more detail, and would be suitable for older students.
• Marco Polo for Kids: His Marvelous Journey to China has lots of information, illustrations, and hands-on projects. One of our favorites is the one that involves mixing up a spicy dough and building terra cotta warriors.

Galileo Lesson Plans

Galileo Galilei was an astronomer, mathematician and physicist who is sometimes called the Father of Modern Science because of his use of observation and experimentation, which we now call the scientific method. We’d like to share with you some of our favorite lesson plans for learning about the life and work of this important man.

Galileo was born in Pisa on 15 February 1564 and lived in Pisa, Padua, and Florence until his death on 8 January 1642. During his lifetime, he made a number of discoveries and experiments in different fields, but it is probably his work in the philosophy of science that has been most important over time.

The life and work of Galileo

Begin by adding Galileo to your classroom timeline in the year of his birth. You can also add other events from Galileo’s life. We like to use a paper cutout for each important person on our timeline, with the name, dates, and place of each person’s life. On the other side of the cutout, have students draw Galileo in the clothing of the time.  We like the statue below, from the Ufizzi Gallery, but students can use an online image search to see paintings and drawings of Galileo, or do general research on the clothing worn during the Italian Renaissance.

Each student can use his or her cut out of Galileo to make a file folder project, as we see in our Heroes lesson plans (we think Galileo belongs in your heroes study too, so check out the ideas there and also in Science Heroes for more activities). Students can use graphic organizers and illustrations to show the things they learn about Galileo, and they can also add pockets to hold written reports, or staple a more formal paper into the folder.

With a nice collection of mini presentation board projects, you can create a display on the life and times of Galileo in your classroom.

Some of the things you might like to include in your study:

• Galileo’s father, a musician and composer, was the first person to prove that the pitch of a string varies as the square root of the tension. This was not exactly new information. since people had been tuning stringed instruments by the Pythagorean system for centuries by then. However, Vincenzo Galilei was the first to do the experiments which showed the math and physics clearly. Galileo brought the same scientific approach to other topics.
• One of the areas in which Galileo was most influential was in materials science, the study of how different materials behave. Another is in the study of motion. A famous experiment combined the two topics. Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, had claimed that objects fell at speeds related to their weight. A light object would therefore fall more slowly than a heavy one. Galileo tested this claim and found that it was false. The story is that Galileo dropped a one pound weight and a ten pound weight at the same time from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to check the claim. Read more about this at the Physics Hypertext and try the experiment with instructions from The Exploratorium. The point, in terms of Galileo’s life, is that he made the experiment in a controlled way. Before Galileo, people had already noticed that Aristotle was wrong, but it was Galileo who prepared a controlled experiment to prove it.
• Galileo made important improvements to the telescope which allowed him to see a new star, to track the phases of Venus (as our moon has phases that make it appear to have a different shape, so does Venus), and to become very sure that the earth went around the sun and not the other way around. Copernicus had already said this, but Galileo was very dedicated to making it known to the general public. It’s difficult to do astronomical observation with a telescope in school (not dark enough), but Science Netlinks has a lesson on telescopes which focuses on the scientific method.
• Galileo got into trouble with the Inquisition in 1633, even though he was a devout Catholic and a friend of the Pope, and ended his life under house arrest. When FreshPlans went to Rome, we had the opportunity to visit an exhibit on this interesting part of Galileo’s life at the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs, an extremely beautiful church designed in part by Michelangelo and built on the Diocletian Baths, an enormous bathhouse of Ancient Rome. The photo at the beginning of this post shows the dome of the basilica, designed in honor of Galileo, and we have a little slideshow below that shows some other parts of the church, including a statue of Galileo designed by a Chinese artist in the 21st century. In 2000, Pope John Paul II publicly expressed regret for the condemnation of Galileo, but there is still a surprising amount of controversy — not about whether the earth moves around the sun, but about what the Galileo Affair tells us about the relationship between science and religion. Have older students research “the Galileo Affair” and write about it. We would have them include both sources from the Catholic church and from the scientific community, because both groups have interesting things to say on the subject, but you know your community best.

The book Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei by Peter Sis is a wonderful and accessible book about Galileo for kids.

Galileo was a fine writer, and his books were very influential. Perhaps even more influential were letters that he wrote; they were shared publicly in the same way that we might now share a really good Facebook post. We haven’t found any versions of Galileo’s works that will be readable for students, but you might like to read The Essential Galileo for background. Quotes from Galileo:

“The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.”

“Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

Haunted House Lesson Plans

Haunted houses are part of mythology and urban legends in many places and times. They make a good topic for lessons with art, social studies, and writing.  Depending on your population, you can put them together with ghost stories for a great genre lesson, use them for Halloween  or architecture units, or include them in studies of logic or the scientific method. We have a couple of fun lesson plans for you below.

Here are a couple of online lesson plans and resources:

• A technology lesson plan from TCR includes planning sheet, rubric sheet, and guided imagery script for a creative project about haunted houses. The directions specify the super easy and economical Kid Pix  software, but we think you could use any graphics program.
• Coffee Painting suggests strong instant coffee to paint scenes of haunted houses.
  

Here are a couple of our favorites:

Architecture of Spooky Houses

Some supposedly haunted houses are not very spooky, and some spooky houses aren’t haunted. The house in the photo above is the home where some of our ancestors lived, and we have no reason to think that it was haunted or even spooky — but we think it could make a great start for a picture of a spooky house. Here’s how:

• Have students find photos of spooky or potentially spooky houses. Collect them, either on a bulletin board or at a collecting website like Pinterest (the link takes you to whatever other people have pinned up for “haunted houses” lately, but you can make one for your own class). ask students not to search for haunted houses, but just to look at houses and homes and choose the ones they think look spooky — or would look spooky if they weren’t cheerily decorated.
• Then, have students find pictures of haunted houses from books, movies, TV, and other popular media. Collect these, too.
• Have students look at the two collections and identify the characteristics that make a house look spooky. Get as specific as possible.
• Once students have identified as many characteristics as possible, have them do an image search for Gothic Revival and Queen Anne architectural styles. They may find that the characteristics of these architectural styles overlap their list quite a bit. However, their list may also include things like “crooked windows,” “abandoned,” “dark,” or “dirty.” With the new information they find, students should complete the class list of characteristics of spooky houses.
• Have students design their spooky houses, using whatever medium fits best into your curriculum. Some possibilities include using SketchUp, cutting silhouettes from black paper and adding them to watercolor backgrounds, or building models from foam board.
• While students work, play spooky music like “Night on Bald Mountain” or “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” The Most Frightening Music in the Universe is a compilation of such pieces. Classical Terror is another. Your library may have some spooky classical pieces on hand, too.

Read and respond

Haunted houses are important characters in some great books. Here are some of our favorites:

• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is creepily terrifying in a subtle way that might be especially appealing to students who have gotten accustomed to gory movie and video game special effects.
• The House With a Clock In Its Walls  was written by John Bellairs and illustrated by Edward Gorey, which is about the best provenance possible for a spooky book for kids. It’s a Halloween story, too.
• The Fall of the House of Usher  by Edgar Allen Poe is a classic from that master of the gothic tale.

There are also nonfiction accounts of buildings people believe to be haunted:

• The Crescent Hotel is a charming building in Eureka Springs, a lovely town right near where we live. If you send students to this website, have them proofread it for extra learning!
• The Winchester House in San Jose has a snazzy website with sudden surprising sounds.
• Oak Alley Plantation has a page of ghost stories.

After reading some ghostly stories and accounts of supposed hauntings, students can write their own haunted house story, or an essay explaining why they do or do not believe in haunted houses.

When we discuss these topics, we’re steadfast about treating them as good stories and leaving all discussions of the afterlife to students’ parents. If you’re up for it, though, the widespread belief in ghosts (some surveys say 90% of Americans claim to believe) and the complete lack of hard evidence make it an interesting phenomenon to explore.

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