Cuneiform wasn't the first writing in Mesopotamia. It followed a heiroglyphic form of writing much like the Egyptians had. Each word was a picture-symbol. The cuneiform words were derived from the former heiroglyphs used for each word. There was a word in cuneiform which resembled a flowerpot on top of a person's chest. What it turned out to be, was actually a brazier on the chest, and it represented the word "love". The meaning turned out to be, that love was the fire that burned in the chest. Translation can also be very difficult, because their minds and our minds worked in very different ways. With the many matches and lighters in our society, we think of fires as something that is 'blown out'. In their time, however, one woke up, went to the coals of the previous day's fire, put in some fresh fuel, and 'blew the fire on'. If there were no coals, they had to use friction, and blow the fire on from that point. At least that's how it was worded in Akkadian back then - one "blew a fire" to light it. Campbell Thompson spent most of his life trying to identify all the plants used for medicine back then, but when you have no pictures (heiroglyphs would really have helped here), how does one translate "Dog's-tongue Plant", "Kasu-Plant", and "Fox-Grape". After decades of work in this field, he died, disgusted with how little he was able to accomplish. Naglabu was an Assyrian word for the surgeon's knife. It could be written with three signs meaning "knife [of] barber". The Sumerian pictogram for the same word includes a symbol which seems to represent a barber's hand. This can be very confusing, until it becomes known that the job of surgeon came from the job of a barber. They were the only ones who had great skill with sharp knives (sissors not having been invented yet). I'm not an expert in cuneiform, and maybe somebody else can give you more info for the kids. Leah has a nice post on the schooling of scribes here. That might help. :-)