Mesopotamian Geckos & Crested Cuneiform

There is sometimes so much that happens in a day that it's hard to keep things straight!

Today Room 503 became the proud parents of two Crested Geckos. Well, actually, we are the proud expectant parents of two Crested Geckos as they are currently incubating in their eggs, their due date being sometime around Halloween.

We are grateful to Mrs. Bush (Ryan's mom, not the President's wife) for offering us the eggs and bringing us all the fixings for their early beginnings: a cage, food supplements, water dishes, foliage and, right now, a mini gladware box, filled with slightly damp soil rocks for the eggs to grow and wait out their last month and a half in.

This afternoon we focused our studies on Mesopotamia, and in particular, the invention of writing. Students then had the opportunity to practice writing as the scribes of Mesopotamia did, using cuneiform (the world's first writing system). First, they translated words and sentences into cuneiform signs. Then they worked with clay to write the cuneiform translations into tablets. This was not easy. But it gave the students an idea of how laborious it must have been to work with a stylus and clay. In their journals they wrote:

It was very hard to write in symbols. The symbols would get blurry and could not be read. It must have been hard for the Sumerians to write like this, but I suppose if you mastered it, it would become easier.

It's way harder to write in clay than you'd think!...Another thing that messed me up was the bumps in the clay. It was hard to make the writing legible...on paper it's flat...which makes it way easier.

Writing in cuneiform was pretty hard and kinda fun at the same time. It was really hard drawing those little symbols on clay with pencils. I can't imagine how long it took back then.

Back to the drawing board - or the white board - I guess!

Cheers,
Ms. Pitman