Rookies History Month 1 — Mesopotamia: From Nomads to Cities

*Here is your checklist for this week

**Reminder to start reading or keep reading Owls in the Family for our book club in a couple weeks!

Hi Rookies! This year we are going to travel through time and look at a few of the earliest civilizations that existed on our planet. It is definitely going to be exciting to look at the evidence we have left from the past, and think about how we humans ended up where we are today!

This week we are investigating Ancient Mesopotamia, where people first started to settle down and figure out how to grow plants and animals to eat, and live with a lot of people near each other in towns and cities, rather than moving around and hunting and gathering for their sustenance.

Learn

First, to learn a bit about this time, place, and people, watch episodes 23 and 24 (Mesopotamia parts 1 and 2, eleven minutes each) of Kids’ Animated History with Pipo, about the Mesopotamian civilizations and what they were able to achieve. (This series is available on the Tubi app or website on device or TV; your mom will have to sign up for a free account to watch the episodes.)

Tell

Next, draw a picture of something that interested you from the episodes you watched, and tell someone in your family about your picture. We are going to save these pictures, so do your best work! You might want to label it with what it is, like “First Farming,” “Sargon of Akkad,” “Enkidu,” or “Hanging Gardens of Babylon”. Moms, if you or whomever is listening are able, write a little of what they tell about it as a caption or on the back of the picture.

Map

Also, print out this map of the Fertile Crescent area and do these things with it:

1. Find the Tigris and Euphrates rivers mentioned in the video that made the Mesopotamian civilizations possible, and color them blue.
2. If you can write, draw a line from each river down to the blank part of the page below the map, so you have room to write, and label them with their names: “Tigris River” and “Euphrates River”.
3. Color the Fertile Crescent green to show that it was able to support growing plants for food and for animals to graze!
4. Can you find this area on a big world map also? See if you can. Look for the water and landform shapes you see on your small map. Ask your mom to help you find a world map on the computer, or in a book if you don’t have one hanging up in your house. What modern day countries are in this area now? Bring your map to class so we can add a few more things to it.

Abacus

Lastly, please watch this video and this other video about how to use a soroban abacus. This week we will be learning how to read numbers on the abacus. Practice clearing your abacus from the first video and setting some numbers and reading what they are on the abacus from the second video. (Moms: I also recommend watching this “for parents” video yourself. Different videos and instructions I’m seeing put the “ones place” on different rods. We’re just going to go with the closest to what he recommends in this video series and use the rod with the second dot from the right of the abacus. Ours isn’t exactly the same size as what he is modeling on but it doesn’t matter. The interesting thing is that you can use any rod as the ones place, and the others would just adjust accordingly. Any rods to the right of the ones place could be used much later down the road for decimals, or a bit sooner down the road to count cents in money calculations. Also, they don’t need to master anything at home; if they can just get the basic idea and start to understand how the numbers are represented as they are able, that’s great. This should be super cool!)

We will learn how to use the abacus and practice all year in our history class! Before calculators were invented, this clever little device helped people add, subtract, multiply, and divide big numbers very quickly and easily. It will be amazingly good for your brain, and fun too. If you don’t have an abacus yet, just watch the video to learn about it, and have your mom get the link from Sara to order one.

This week in class . . .

To class, bring your drawing, your map, your abacus, and your toga from Vision Days if you still have it (I picked up a couple extra from the ground etc. during Vision Days. Hopefully we have ten altogether, which I will try to coordinate on Telegram. We have one last Hercules hurrah to do in class). It will be a super fun day; I can’t wait to see you there!