NYLearns.org - IMOK. UROK. by Exploratorium

Activity

IMOK. UROK. by Exploratorium

Subject

Social Studies (NYS K-12 Framework Common Core)

Grade Levels

Intermediate, 6th Grade

Content Provider

Description

This activity demonstrates that you can make sentences without words. This is a good activity to introduce students to the development of writing in ancient cultures using symbols or pictures to represent words.

Materials

The word puzzles on this web page.

What's Going On?

Making rebuses was an important step in the history of writing. Back in the fourth millennium B.C., in a region called Mesopotamia, the ancient Sumerians developed a system of writing with pictographs -- they drew pictures to represent things that they wanted to keep records of.

But drawing pictures to represent things is a limited way of writing. You can write only about things that you can draw -- like an ox or a bird or a fish or a plow. You can't write someone's name or write about something that you can't draw -- feelings like love or hate or confusion.

To get around this limitation, the Sumerians started using pictures to make readers think of a sound, rather than an object. For instance, you can think of the picture below as an eye, or you can just think of the sound that you make when you say the letter I. In Sumerian writing, a picture of a hand, for example, came to stand for the Sumerian word su, which meant "hand," but also stood for the sound "su," which could be used to make other words. Using this rebus writing made it possible to write about things that couldn't easily be pictured.

To Do and Notice

Can you read this sentence?

I C U.

I C U isn't a sentence. I C U isn't even a word. But if you say each letter out loud, you'll say a simple sentence, "I see you." Some letters in English sound just like other words. When you say C it sounds just like the words "see"; and "sea"
Try to figure out what these sentences mean by saying each letter or number out loud. The answers are below.

A B S E-Z 2 C.
K-T S B-Z.
I M N A C-T.

Can you make up your own sentences using only letters and numbers?
A rebus is a kind of puzzle that adds pictures to letters and numbers to make words and sentences. As Arnold Schwarzenegger once said:
Can you tell what is being said in the conversation below? Make up your own rebus puzzle and see if your friends can figure it out.