The encounter of civilizations is our driving theme in 5th grade this year. To start generating a list of the attributes of civilizations and also to explore what kinds of consequences arise out of two civilizations encountering each other, we read the book Encounter by Jane Yolen:
Next, to extrapolate this concept of an encounter and put our own current civilization into the story, students created comics that imagined the first contact between modern humans and an "alien civilization." Yes, they have been a lot of fun, but creating them also forced us to reflect on the basic attributes of civilizations (i.e. government, economy, currency, clothing, language, number system, holidays, norms, etc.).
Then we read the story of a boy who was so fed up with his own civilization, who felt so left out and unrecognized, that he literally invented his own from the ground up. Meet Weslandia:
With Weslandia as our inspiration, we've now begun the gradual process of designing our own civilizations. We are starting with Math, or course! OK, it wouldn't have been everyone's choice, but you have to start somewhere. So far, we've studied the number systems of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans and Greeks. We'll also study some more modern systems, like binary, before we start creating our own number systems.
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