We first started reading Story of the World when my child was 7. For Chapters 1-6 we went very slowly, doing only one sub-chapter, maybe two a week, and often breaking the sub-chapters into smaller parts over several days. When we got to chapter 6 we took a long break to study a number of old testament Bible stories that take place between Abraham and Joseph, and while we were doing that I learned that our co-op would be working through Story of the World Volume 1 the following year, so I decided to hold off and wait to cover the rest of the book until then.
This was the first chapter we read the following year. Though we had participated in activities for our co-op over the chapters we'd already read, we hadn't gone back and read them. My son had grown a lot in reading patience at that time, so I decided to try all of Chapter 7 in one day...but I wish we hadn't. It was a little much for him...especially all those laws. So if I were doing it over I'd read over all the paragraphs UNTIL we got to the list of Hammurabi's laws on one day, and then done the laws the next.
We looked at the carving of Hammurabi and his laws in a library book, but you can also find these pictures at the wikipedia page on Hammurabi.
I talked with my son about how, though some of the laws seemed very harsh, they were much better than no law. For instance, the "eye for an eye" law was not just giving a punishment, but LIMITING a punishment (so that someone who had lost an eye might not try to do something even worse, like kill the person, in revenge).
Other than that we didn't do a lot on this chapter. We are covering Bible stories too, so when we got to The 10 Commandments (which we studied along with the stories of Moses and the Exodus) then we looked at some of these again and compared Hammurabi's Laws and the 10 Commandments. That could be done here too.
(Yep, this was a rather uneventful chapter for us. As we began to work at a faster pace we started doing less as far as projects, though we did still do some creative stuff along the way.)
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