Skills

Quick review of Monday's catechism. Why do we exist? Recite YOUCAT 1 from memory if you can: 'We are here on earth in order to know and to love God, to do good according to his will, and to go someday to heaven.' Then turn it into a prayer: thank God that he made you for himself and ask him to help you study today as one way of coming to know him through his creation and his truth.

Grammar is the engineering of language — the rules that let words carry meaning. THE RULE: A complete sentence has two things: a subject (who or what the sentence is about) and a predicate (what is said about the subject, built around a verb), and together they express a complete thought. Every word in English does one of eight jobs, the eight parts of speech: noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection. This week we start with the noun — a person, place, thing, or idea (Sumer, Ur, scribe, wisdom). WORKED EXAMPLE 1: 'Sumerian scribes pressed wedges into clay.' Subject = 'scribes' (a noun); predicate = 'pressed wedges into clay.' Nouns here: scribes, wedges, clay. WORKED EXAMPLE 2: 'The ziggurat rose above the city.' Subject = 'ziggurat'; nouns: ziggurat, city. Now you try. PRACTICE — underline every noun, then label the subject of each sentence: (1) The river flooded the fields. (2) Hammurabi wrote laws for his people. (3) Courage protects a city. (4) Merchants traded copper and timber. (5) Wisdom guided the king.

Geography is the stage on which history is acted. The Fertile Crescent is a curving band of good farmland that arcs from the Persian Gulf up through Mesopotamia, bends west across the top of the Syrian desert, and comes down the eastern Mediterranean coast — a 'crescent' shape, hence the name. At its heart run the two rivers that made Sumer possible: the Tigris (the eastern, faster river) and the Euphrates (the western, longer one). Both rise in the mountains of modern Turkey and flow southeast to the Persian Gulf, today joining before they reach the sea. Around them: the Zagros Mountains to the east, the Arabian Desert to the south and west, the Mediterranean Sea to the west, and Anatolia (Turkey) to the north. This week's map skill is the foundation of every map you will draw this year: learn to start with rivers and coastlines, because water shapes where people live. TODAY'S DRAWING TASK: On a blank outline map of the Middle East, draw and label the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean Sea, the Zagros Mountains, and shade the Fertile Crescent in a curving band. Mark the cities of Ur, Uruk, and Babylon along the rivers.

Skills day built two tools: you learned what makes a complete sentence (subject + predicate + complete thought) and you drew the two rivers that gave birth to civilization. Both are foundations you will build on for 31 more weeks.