This week, we delved further into our topic ‘Hola Mexico’, and started to look at the Maya civilisation. After spending a lesson researching different aspects of the Maya, we moved on to looking at their writing system.

We discovered that glyphs are the writing style of the ancient Maya, and that the Maya were one of only three civilisations that invented a complete system of writing. Although, until relatively recently, the glyphs were not understood, now the ‘Mayan code’ has largely been broken and it is possible to understand much of what was written on temples, monuments and other objects made by the ancient Maya.

We spent some time looking at the glyphs and discussing how we could use the syllables in our name to represent how to write it. This appeared to be quite challenging at time as we discovered that some sounds and letters were not represented in the Mayan writing system.

We are all looking forward to next week where we will be making our Mexican masks!