The Story of Writing - Spring Break Art Intensive

In our recent 2-day art intensive, we fully immersed ourselves into the Story of Writing. Our exploration began with a visit to the Morgan Library, and a look at illuminated manuscripts. 

We looked at various ancient writing forms, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mayan glyphs, and made a pendant inspired by these early markings. 

We studied the Inca quipus, and learned how the Inca used knots to keep accounts. The knots at the top of the string represented the hundreds, the knots in the middle represented the tens, and the last group represented the ones. Each color stood for something. Here is one student's quipu and her key for keeping record of her stock of animals. 

We loved exploring the Rosetta stone, and the kids wrote "My name is..." in Ancient Egyptian and Modern Greek. We also taught about rebus, and the kids loved writing sentences with pictures.