“How the Sumerians made Tablets and How They Made Them”, a narration by Oscar, age 7.

I made a cylinder seal by taking some clay, rolling it up into a cylinder, and then carving my initials in it with a toothpick. We made a hole in the middle of the cylinder: we put a wire through the clay when it was not baked, and then we wiggled it around. And then we put it in the oven.

And when it was done, we took some clay; we made it into a square; and then we rolled the cylinder seal on it to make a tablet. Then we put it into the oven to bake, and when it was done we took pictures of it. And we made the cylinder seal into a necklace.

We did a cylinder seal for us to learn about the Sumerians and what they did to make tablets. They used clay tablets to make writing on; like, if you were going to make a message to your friend, and you were with the Sumerians a long time ago, that’s how you would send messages and things. They would make them out of mud, mud-clay, not our clay. They would do the same thing as we did, only it was different because they carved the letters out with a reed stem.

The Sumerians lived between two rivers called the Tigris and the Euphrates. They liked living in the middle of two rivers because then they could float down the rivers to go other places.