On the completion of our first project

I thought you might enjoy seeing our cuneiform tablets – the one planned activity my son and I actually accomplished this week.

OK, so we didn’t get a 3D solar system mobile made, and we certainly didn’t try to rebuild the ark in miniature… but we did get to squish and squeeze and knead clay, then roll it and squish it and roll it some more… and then, when we got tired of that (and, frankly, I think we were both having so much fun that would have been enough!)… but, when we got tired of doing that, we used our wedge-shaped craft sticks to attempt cuneiform writing.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I’m afraid. Like his mother, my son sat paralyzed with indecision over what to put on his tablet. “I can’t do this!” he wailed. “I don’t know how to write in cuneiform! I don't even know what to say!”

Once he saw that I was just “making it up” (after trying and failing miserably myself at copying the symbols in our encyclopedia), he tentatively scored the surface of his flattened piece of clay, then grew more confident, and tried creating his own versions of the chicken scratches known as cuneiform. I thought he did a pretty terrific job.