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The sun origin secret codes12/30/2023 Chicago, Ill.: Raintree.ĭeady, Kathleen W. Destroy after Reading: The World of Secret Codes, Culture in Action. “Harry Potter and the Coding of Secrets.” Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School 14 (2):114-121.Ĭolson, Mary. New York, NY: Dutton Children’s Books.Ĭhua, Boon Liang. Mysterious Messages: A History of Codes and Ciphers. New York, NY: Scholastic Inc.īlackwood, Gary L., and Jason Henry. Mankato, Minn.: Capstone Press.Īrlon, Penelope. New York: DK Pub.Īllen, Kathy, and Mari Bolte. Code Breakers: From Hieroglyphs to Hackers. We give each writer one sheet of paper with the hieroglyphics key and another with an Egyptian-style frame around a space for writing a message.Īdams, Simon, and Peter Chrisp. In our workshops, we find that our writers can also easily create their messages by drawing the glyphs themselves. Writers anxious about “amount of writing” or “filling the page” can communicate without pressure to produce volume. Because the project in this workshop is to create a short message and/or sign, it’s a great ice-breaker activity. The one-on-one correspondence of alphabet/phonetic sounds with the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols creates an opportunity to communicate through writing. Although there are thousands of symbols, the most commonly occurring are a set of 24, which modern archaeologists use as a working alphabet. There was no punctuation, and to save space two small symbols often occupied the space of one larger one. To read a horizontal line, one moved toward the faces of the animal symbols, which all faced in the same direction. Hieroglyphs were written vertically (top to bottom) or horizontally (left to right or right to left). Vowels were not written, but were added (usually eh or ah) by the reader. This is the closest the Egyptians ever came to creating an alphabet. Several symbols were written together to make a word. Eventually, a system evolved in which a symbol was drawn to represent a specific sound (a consonant). But certain objects, and more particularly ideas, were difficult to represent with a single drawing. A simple drawing of the sun represented the sun, a drawing of a vulture signifies a vulture, a drawing of a rope indicated a rope, and so on. (These facts are from the National Endowment for the Humanities Website, z.umn.edu/NEHhieroglyphs.) Each picture was a symbol representing something they observed in their surroundings. The ancient Egyptians created the form of picture-writing known as hieroglyphs around 3100 BCE. Hieroglyphs can give writers the same feeling of mastery, and tie into the Ancient Egypt curriculum familiar to most elementary school students. When I was a kid in middle school, a self-proclaimed group of geeks produced an entire newsletter written in Middle Earth Elvish. There’s something irresistible about being able to write a message that only you and your friends can read. Secret code books were among the highest-interest titles in my public and school libraries.
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