ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS

We will learn that a civilisation is a developed society. Civilisations share common features, including cities, inventions, language, writing, hierarchy, leadership, infrastructure, arts and culture, trade and religion. Ancient civilisations first appeared over 6000 years ago in, or near, a semicircular area of land in the Middle East known as the Fertile Crescent. The climate, availability of water
and variety of plants in the Fertile Crescent meant that nomadic hunter-gatherers could settle in one place and begin to farm for the first time.

ANCIENT SUMER

The first civilisation that we will find out about is Ancient Sumer.  

Ancient Sumer was the very first civilisation. It originated between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in modern Iraq. Being near a river was important for early civilisations, providing water for drinking and fertile soil for agriculture. The ancient Sumerian civilisation began
c4500 BC and lasted for around 2600 years.

ANCIENT EGYPT

The ancient Egyptian civilisation began on the banks of the Nile, in the Fertile Crescent. Egypt was initially split into Upper Egypt in the south and Lower Egypt in the north. It became one kingdom c3150 BC. The civilisation lasted for around 2970 years.

Finally we will answer our big question:

Would you rather live in Ancient Sumer or Ancient Egypt?

TOMB BUILDERS PROJECT

We embarked on the Tomb Builders companion project where we learnt about simple machines.  We looked at the inclined plane, lever, wedge, pulley, wheel and axle and screw learning what each machine was used for.  Next we hunted for the simple machines in our environment and were surprised to find many simple machines in our classroom.  Following this we were challenged to design a prototype of a tomb builders machine that could've be used in the pyramids in Ancient Egypt to help move heavy objects, using at least one of the simple machines we had explored.  We then built our simple machines and evaluated them against the design brief!