Holy Mesopotamia Batman: First Grade Common Core Social Studies vocabulary

[MineralMan]

59. First Grade: I remember First Grade.

It was 1951, and my teacher was Miss Setzer. I even remember learning about Mesopotamia, Egypt, and all that stuff. It was my first introduction to cuneiform writing, which Miss Setzer explained as the first form of writing we know about. We looked at pictures of cuneiform writing on clay tablets, and spent a class hour with little wooden wedges and modeling clay. We learned to write numbers in cuneiform on those wedges. It was cool, since we were also learning to write numbers at the same time.

The next day, we built a pyramid in class out of blocks. It was pretty big for a bunch of first-graders. Then, we looked at pictures of pyramids in Egypt, the Nile River, and saw hieroglyphics for the first time. Miss Setzer also explained why civilization started along the banks of rivers and told us about the flooding that was the basis of Egyptian agricullture.

We also learned the term, "Cradle of Civilization," saw pictures of mummies of Pharaohs from ancient Egypt and saw a photo of a sarcophagus. From there, we later moved on to other parts of the world, and learned about Israel, Persia, and other places. We learned about the religions of those areas and how they all related to each other.

We got some information about ancient Greece during 1st grade, to, along with ancient Rome, and some of the other history of the world then. It was all part of a method of teaching history, starting at the beginning of recorded history. In Second grade, we moved on to Europe, and learned lots more things.

There doesn't seem to be much new in this curriculum. It sounds a lot like the curriculum in the grammar school I went to in the early 1950s. We progressed from the earliest recorded history year after year. In the fourth grade, we studied California history, learned the names of the native American tribes in California, visited one of the Missions and learned about the Spanish explorers, and so on. We even learned some very basic Spanish that same year, visited a Native American kitchen midden and searched for shells and a few kids found some arrow points at the midden. Again, it was taught sequentially and historically. That process continued through the curriculum all the way through high school. It was the standard curriculum in California at the time, with regard to history.

We learned those words, those concepts, and basic human history, starting in the first grade with the earliest historical civilizations. That's how they taught it. Looks like they're still doing the same thing.