Baghdad Museum

If you're using the AMP Reading System, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Mesopotamia is a really great supplement to the Unit 3 stories about the same subject.

I picked this little number up at my local library. We've already discussed the Iraq War, and we watched a documentary and read an Iraqi woman's blog to get some background. Now, after reading the AMP stories about the plundering of one of the most important museums in the world, we took a virtual "tour" of the museum as it once was by projecting images from the book onto the white board and reading the curators' notes. It's great, because the AMP book mentions (but doesn't have pictures of) several of the pieces highlighted in the The Looting of the Iraq Museum. So my students felt like, "Hey! I know about that!"

We also practiced scanning for information. I'd say something like, "Somebody tell me about cylinder seals, and my students would find the information in their AMP books. After we reviewed the section, we'd look at the real thing.

Afterwards, my students were really able to discuss intelligently the situation in Iraq, as well as the concept of what makes a thing valuable. They tsk-tsked over the loss of such precious works of art, sometimes gasping out loud when I showed them something that had been destroyed beyond repair or stolen and never seen again.