1. Teacher Guide
This lesson is designed to teach kids to ask a critical thinking question that you can’t just put into a search box to solve. To do that, we encourage them with smaller questions that search can help them answer. Make sure that you read the notes for each slide: they not only give you teaching tips but also provide answers and hints so you can help the kids if they are having trouble.
Remember, you can always send feedback to the Bing in the Classroom team at You can learn more about the program at bing.com/classroom and follow the daily lessons on the Microsoft Educator Network.
Want to extend today’s lesson? Consider using Skype in the Classroom to arrange for your class to chat with another class in today’s location, take a Skype lesson on today’s topic, or invite a guest speaker to expand on today’s subject. And if you are using Windows 8, the panoramas in the MSN Travel App are great teaching tools. We have thousands of other education apps available on Windows here.
Nell Bang-Jensen is a teacher and theater artist living in Philadelphia, PA. Her passion for arts education has led her to a variety of roles including developing curriculum for Philadelphia Young Playwrights and teaching at numerous theaters and schools around the city. She works with playwrights from ages four to ninety on developing new work and is especially interested in alternative literacies and theater for social change. A graduate of Swarthmore College, she currently works in the Artistic Department of the Wilma Theater and, in addition to teaching, is a freelance actor and dramaturg. In 2011, Nell was named a Thomas J. Watson Fellow and spent her fellowship year traveling to seven countries studying how people get their names.
This lesson is designed to teach the Common Core State Standard: Reading—Informational Text
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.3 Describe the relationship between a series of historical events, scientific ideas or concepts, or steps in technical procedures in a text, using language that pertains to time, sequence, and cause/effect.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.7 Use information gained from illustrations (e.g., maps, photographs) and the words in a text to demonstrate understanding of the text (e.g., where, when, why, and how key events occur).
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.5 Use text features and search tools (e.g., key words, sidebars, hyperlinks) to locate information relevant to a given topic efficiently.

2. What can petroglyphs tell us about the people who lived on earth before us?
© Jane Sweeney/Getty Images
Having this up as kids come in is a great settle down activity. You can start class by asking them for thoughts about the picture or about ideas on how they could solve the question of the day.

3. What can petroglyphs tell us about the people who lived on earth before us?
The 400 mud volcanoes in Azerbaijan’s Gobustan National Park are generally quiet – simmering slowly and making for great video and photo opportunities. But every couple decades, one of the mud pots erupts, sending a vent of flame hundreds of feet into the sky and blasting tons of mud onto the landscape.
Don’t let those geologic histrionics keep you away. Gobustan offers many incredible experiences for those who make the trek to this park, situated between the Greater Caucasus mountain range and the shores of the Caspian Sea.
Though it’s now an arid climate, the region was once a lush wilderness that supported some of humanity’s oldest civilizations. Those early communities left their mark on the landscape with rock carvings made as much as 40,000 years ago. The petroglyphs, scratched onto boulders and the sides of cliffs, are now protected inside the park.
Depending on time, you can either have students read this silently to themselves, have one of them read out loud, or read it out loud yourself.

4. What can petroglyphs tell us about the people who lived on earth before us?1
Web Search
Where does the word “petroglyph” come from? What can this tell us about its meaning? 2
How many years ago were most petroglyphs made? What does it mean to be “prehistoric”? 3
Image Search/Thinking
Find images of petroglyphs online. Based on what you see, what do you think the people who made them were trying to communicate? 4
When do historians believe that people started writing? Why might petroglyphs have been especially important before this time? 5
Web Search/Thinking
What do people think might be the purpose of petroglyphs and what might the people who wrote them be trying to communicate?
There are a couple of ways to use this slide, depending on how much technology you have in your classroom. You can have students find answers on their own, divide them into teams to have them do all the questions competitively, or have each team find the answer to a different question and then come back together. If you’re doing teams, it is often wise to assign them roles (one person typing, one person who is in charge of sharing back the answer, etc.)

5. What can petroglyphs tell us about the people who lived on earth before us?5
Minutes
You can adjust this based on how much time you want to give kids. If a group isn’t able to answer in 5 minutes, you can give them the opportunity to update at the end of class or extend time.

6. What can petroglyphs tell us about the people who lived on earth before us?1
Web Search
Where does the word “petroglyph” come from? What can this tell us about its meaning? 2
How many years ago were most petroglyphs made? What does it mean to be “prehistoric”? 3
Image Search/Thinking
Find images of petroglyphs online. Based on what you see, what do you think the people who made them were trying to communicate? 4
When do historians believe that people started writing? Why might petroglyphs have been especially important before this time? 5
Web Search/Thinking
What do people think might be the purpose of petroglyphs and what might the people who wrote them be trying to communicate?

7. What can petroglyphs tell us about the people who lived on earth before us?1
Web Search
Where does the word “petroglyph” come from? What can this tell us about its meaning?
(Possible Search Queries: “what is a petroglyph?”, “what does petroglyph mean?”).
From
The word comes from the Greek words petro-, theme of the word "petra" meaning "stone", and glyphein meaning "to carve", and was originally coined in French as pétroglyphe.

8. What can petroglyphs tell us about the people who lived on earth before us?2
Web Search
How many years ago were most petroglyphs made? What does it mean to be “prehistoric”?
(Possible Search Queries: “when are petroglyphs from?”, “what does ‘prehistoric’ mean?”).
From and from
Some petroglyphs are dated to approximately the Neolithic and late Upper Paleolithic boundary, about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, if not earlier (Kamyana Mohyla). Sites in Australia have petroglyphs that are estimated to be as much as 27,000 years old, and in other places could be as old as 40,000 years. Around 7,000 to 9,000 years ago, other precursors of writing systems, such as pictographs and ideograms, began to appear.
Pre-history is the time before the inventions of writing. We have no written records of those times. Pre-historic time is a bit different from different civilizations. For example,  in places like Ancient Egypt, things were recorded from very early times (around 3200 BCE) and these records can be studied. However, places like New Guinea people only started recording history around Mostly  mankind started to record history around 5,500 years ago.

9. What can petroglyphs tell us about the people who lived on earth before us?3
Image Search/Thinking
Find images of petroglyphs online. Based on what you see, what do you think the people who made them were trying to communicate?
(Possible Search Query: “Bing/Images: petroglyphs”).
Students should look at a variety of images of petroglyphs, such as the ones found here: and here: and discuss what commonalities they find. Answers will vary. Students may notice, for example, that the images are often of animals. They should think about how these animals may have symbolized something, or marked a certain place that was good for hunting. Maybe people were trying to label a particular location, take count of something, or express a cultural or religious belief.

10. What can petroglyphs tell us about the people who lived on earth before us?4
Web Search
When do historians believe that people started writing? Why might petroglyphs have been especially important before this time?
(Possible Search Queries: “for kids, prehistory, when did people start writing?”, “for kids, when was writing invented?”).
From
History began when humans learned how to read and write. The first writing we know of came from civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt about 5500 years ago. People lived for hundreds of thousands of years before this, but little changed from generation to generation. Prehistoric humans were nomads. Nomads are people who have no permanent home. Men hunted animals and women gathered wild plants. When there were no more animals to hunt or plants to gather, the nomads moved to a new place. Eventually, people learned how to write. Writing allowed people to pass their knowledge onto others.
Students should think about how petroglyphs may have allowed these nomads to pass the information they gained onto others. Even if there wasn’t a specific language in which to do so, the images they carved could indicate certain trails, pathways, or rituals.

11. What can petroglyphs tell us about the people who lived on earth before us?5
Web Search/Thinking
What do people think might be the purpose of petroglyphs and what might the people who wrote them be trying to communicate?
(Possible Search Queries: “what are petroglyphs?”, “interpretation of petroglyphs”, “what do petroglyphs communicate?”).
From
Some petroglyphs are thought to be astronomical markers, maps, and other forms of symbolic communication, including a form of "pre-writing.” Petroglyph maps may show trails, symbols communicating time and distances traveled, as well as the local terrain in the form of rivers, landforms and other geographic features. Some petroglyph images probably have deep cultural and religious significance for the societies that created them; in many cases this significance remains for their descendants. Many petroglyphs are thought to represent some kind of not-yet-fully understood symbolic or ritual language.

12. What can petroglyphs tell us about the people who lived on earth before us?
Students should understand that petroglyphs (“stone carvings”) can give us insight into a period of time on earth that we may not know much about otherwise. Some petroglyphs may be as old as 40,000 years, from a prehistoric time before there were writing systems. Because there wasn’t documented history, we don’t know much about the lives of people who lived at this time. We are left to interpret these petroglyphs and what the people creating them might be trying to communicate, in lieu of a written language. Petroglyphs may be interpreted as astronomical markers, maps, symbols of trails, geographic features or cultural and religious images.