Swain campus fifth graders saw their social studies curriculum come to life when they visited the Penn Museum in Philadelphia as an extension of their study of Southwest Asia.

The Penn Museum is an archaeology and anthropology museum at the University of Pennsylvania that features amazing art and artifacts from ancient Egypt, Greece and Italy, Mesopotamia, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Students took guided tours of the Middle East galleries with a focus on Mesopotamia, the birthplace of civilization.

Museum docents used ancient artifacts to show students the progression from large family settlements to empires. Additionally, the students attended a workshop to take an in depth look at cuneiform. They learned how to write their names the same way scribes would have in this civilization, and every student went home with their very own clay tablet inscribed with their name!