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:

View Larger Map

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.

Infographics Lesson Plans

Infographics are trendy, and they’re also an efficient and appealing way of sharing information. Next time you study graphs and charts, include infographics as well.

Read infographics

Begin with my collection of animal infographics at Pinterest, or your own classroom collection. Go through them and discuss what information each one offers. Ask students what makes these pictures infographics rather than just charts or illustrations.

Once all students understand the idea of infographics, ask them to create their own collection. Remind students that infographics are protected under copyright law, just like photos and illustrations. Older students can get some practice with citing sources by providing references for their collections.

Have students work in pairs to identify the characteristics of infographics that make them different from ordinary graphs. Regroup and share the answers. Some of the things students might notice:

• Infographics use visual elements to make an idea clear.
• Infographics may combine different types of graphs and charts into a single image.
• Infographics use more words than a typical chart or graph would.

Have students choose an infographic and write a sentence or a paragraph that clearly states its main point or points.

Create infographics

Some infographics are just graphs with visual elements to make their point clearer, so why not start with a bar graph that uses visual elements to make its point?

Bar graphs are best for data that you can count and compare, so start with data you’ve been studying. Prepare a regular bar graph. Replace the ordinary bars with pictures related to your topic.

Our example was made very simply. First we made a chart at Create a Graph as a starting point.  We asked the class which area of the Ancient World they liked best and put the data into the Create a Graph form, and the tool created a bar graph for us.

We captured it as a picture and loaded it into Adobe Photoshop. We replaced the bars with photos of things that made us think of the different areas of the ancient world. We had taken most of the photos ourselves at museums, but we did use a copyright-free image from Dover for one of our pictures. Using a graphic program for this project gives good practice with the computer, but using scissors and glue works just as well.

Once students have made their bar graph, have them try to make a Venn diagram or pie chart with images relevant to their data. Here’s a Venn diagram comparing two Cinderella-inspired picture books:

Have older students take their data another step away from an ordinary graph:

We played around with more of the tools from Adobe Photoshop to make our graph into an infographic.

More things to do with data for an infographic project:

• Include more than one type of graph.
• Use a graphic shape to hold the information.
• Change the shape or direction of the graph.

We’d love to see what your class comes up with!

Christmas Math

This idea lets you combine measurement and counting with holiday decorating.

Here are some faves from around the web:

• The Christmas Stocking Theorem. Don’t miss the demo in the top right hand corner.
• Not up for a theorem yet? Suite 101 has ideas for young children.
• Googol Learning has some great ideas for real-world connections! Some of my favorites are the tangram Christmas cards, origami ornaments, and Santa Claus calculations. Find them all here.
• Infographics are an increasingly important way to get data. Kelli Anderson’s Christmas Tree Infographic is a good way to learn how to interpret this type of chart, and the data will provide plenty of interesting examples for math lessons.
• About.com has a collection of math worksheets with a Christmas theme.
• Here’s a bunch of math drills decorated with Christmas images.
• Let’s Play Math has a cool collection.
• Mathwire’s monthly collection of lessons always has seasonal stuff. Why not subscribe while you’re there?

This ought to keep your math classes merry and bright.

Christmas in Russia Lesson Plans

Russia had quite a few years during which Christmas was forbidden, but the Russian Christmas has still had a profound influence on our celebration of Christmas in America, and it has some great teaching points. Study math, geography, literature, and art with our Christmas in Russia lesson plans.

Books for this study:

• Christmas in Russia
• The Tale of Baboushka
• Babushka
• Baboushka and the Three Kings
• The Miracle of St. Nicholas
• The Miraculous Child: a Folktale from Old Russia

• Mary Engelbreit’s Nutcracker has none of the darkness of the original.
• The Nutcracker by Susan Jeffers is a pretty, traditional retelling.
• The Story of the Nutcracker Ballet by Diane Goode, a small and simple telling of the story.
• Alison Jay’s version takes place in a snow globe.
• The Pacific Northwest Ballet Presents the Nutcracker is about the ballet in particular, with photos from the production using Maurice Sendak’s wonderful sets.
• Nutcracker Ballet Coloring Book
• The Berenstain Bears and the Nutcracker

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.

Football Math

Football is all about math. Players’ rankings, points, yards, penalties — it’s all numbers. Even the music played by the band is full of quarter notes and eighth notes. You can just pull examples from football when you’re using a football theme, or when you have a class that’s excited about football. You can save time, instead, by using what’s already available.

Here’s a roundup of football themed math games and puzzles. We’ve scoured the web and found you all the good stuff. Most are interactive — we’ve told you when they’re not.

Online resources:

• Tackle Math Ball
• basic calculations
• lots of good football math from NCTM
• a hands-on in-class math football game
• math problems based on actual football
• decimals place value
• adding fractions — just like the previous game, but with different problems
• a simple online game for integers — noisy, but you can turn off the sound
• a DIY board game in a PDF file
• CoolMath’s football games
• an extended word problem on yardage — use the numbers from any game to repeat the exercise
• a clever use of a football field thought problem to illustrate Pythagorean theorem
• an advanced mathematical puzzler

Books:

• an enormous PDF file from the Pro Football Hall of Fame with lots of football math.
• Fantasy Football and Mathematics: A Resource Guide for Teachers and Parents, Grades 5 and Up 
• Football: The Math of the Game

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