Thursday, December 03, 2009

When studying history is fun!


We are on the chapter 10 (out of 42, for the first volume) in our studying of the Ancient World History. The girls and I are having a wonderful time learning together and we have been exploring a lot of ways of learning about the past. I decided to go a bit deeper for each topic and instead of doing one day of history, we will be doing two.

Today we have gone more East. After learning about Egypt and Mesopotamia for a while, it was time for the Harappan cities and the mystery of Mohenjo-Daro. Everybody took upon the idea of building Mohenjo-Daro with a citadel, a well, houses, crop fields, a river, a road, oxen pulling on a cart and a public bath house. It took us a long time to make the bricks and while creating our mini city we were discussing the facts I read out loud to them. A lot of fascinating information kept me going and it seemed that we wanted more and more, we were hungry for knowledge.
We learned that , unfortunately, the Harappan civilization gets very little credit and gets to be overlooked. Since the ancient Egyptians were so preoccupied with leaving noticeable marks in the way of pyramids, the Mesopotamian history is full of stories of fighting, conquering and the empire expanding, apparently, the Harappans were very busy making a nice living for themselves, not worrying about leaving any significant mark in history.

Their writing has not been deciphered yet, and it means that there is still so much to be discovered about this amazing civilization. One thing the girls will remember, for sure. The images of unicorn were among the first to be found in the Harappa cities. It's not that hard to guess what figure we will be making and painting tomorrow.

2 comments:

Desiree said...

Just saw your blog again! See you are well... sorry been so out of touch. Lost my phone for a couple of months and took me a while to regather all my contacts - well I'm still missing too many and with holiday season around the corner - can you resend me your address and email and phone number? dgoldfinger@mindspring.com. This time I'm backing up my contacts online! And... saw this today and thought of you... http://www.cyberbee.com/wwho/

Unknown said...

Hopefully you managed to use Harappa.com to help your students learn more about this from a scientific point of view!