We all know that in teacher land, sometimes lessons flop. big time. This day, however, was not one of those flops. This was the other kind of day - the one were something goes so well that you are sort of dumbstruck - staring at your students thinking "These can't really be MY kids, can they??" Yep, it was the kind of thing that makes you randomly whip out your iPhone and start snapping away. (I didn't post the ones with the kids giving me the "oh my gawd she is such a dork" face.) At any rate, since 6th grade social studies in Ohio focuses on ancient world history, "The Big Dig" is an activity I used to reinforce the idea of archaeology and how we have been able to learn so much about the ancient civilizations that we will be studying this year.
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| First, they had to rope of their "dig site" into a grid and recreate (and label) the grid on graph paper. |
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| Within each dig site was one ceramic tile with a "shadoof" (basically an ancient simple machine) drawn on it. After I completed the drawing, I smashed the tile into pieces and buried them in the dig site. These pieces were the artifacts the students excavated and then pieced together. |
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| Once the artifacts were pieced together and they could see the drawing, they worked together to create a hypothesis on how the machine was used. |
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| These pictures are a little out of order - this one is of a group creating their grid. I bought those cheap little strainers from Wal-mart to be used as their super high-tech excavating equipment. Hey, they bought into it! |
We even managed to rope a little reading into the whole ordeal! In the wrap up discussion, we talked about making inferences (drawing conclusions) and how archaeologists have to do this all the time. Hopefully this enthusiasm for ancient history continues!
