Category: Characters

Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Hi! My name is Claire the Square and I am so excited to talk to you about shapes today! Do you know who else loved shapes? The Ancient Egyptians! They loved them so much they used them instead of letters!!

These Egyptian hieroglyphs were a way for the ancient Egyptians to write things down. They used pictures and symbols to represent words and ideas, kind of like a secret code.
They would put these pictures together to make sentences and stories. They would write them on walls, papyrus and stone tablets. Some pictures represented a sound or a syllable, and others represented a whole word.
They were used in ancient Egypt for more than 3,500 years, but it was difficult to read and write, so only special people like priests and scribes could do it.
I bet you could do it though – try to write your name!

Roman Numerals

Hey guys, Caroline the Line here! I was asked to explain what Roman numerals were, so here we go!
Roman numerals are a special way of writing numbers that people used a long time ago, in ancient Rome.

They use letters instead of numbers to show the value of something.

To write a number using Roman numerals, you put the letters together in a special way. You start with big numbers and make your way to the end. For example if we want to write the number 1125 we would do the following, each numeral added to the previous ones:
Start with M for 1000, add a C for 100, two Xs to make 20, and end with a V for 5:
1125 = 1000 + 100 + 20 + 5 = M + C + X + X + V = MCXXV
There’s one more trick to learn about Roman numerals – when a symbol of a smaller value appears before a symbol of greater value, it will be subtracted from it:
For Example: IV = V – I = 5 – 1 = 4.