The second graders at Foothills Academy had fun Monday searching out in the garden boxes for (pre-planted) obsidian chunks and stone tools. Note Kyle in the foreground carefully taking notes about everything that was found!
We've had some really fun lessons at Foothills Academy in Wheat Ridge, Colorado to prepare the students for the upcoming expedition. Monday morning we had a mock archaeological dig for the second graders. They had a great time feeling real seal fur and fossilized walrus teeth before going down to dig in the garden boxes for (pre-planted) obsidian tools and dried corn cobs.
"I found something!" yelled one second grader. The others all turned to look at the shiny, black volcanic glass glinting in the sun.
"I think it was used for an arrowhead," said the proud discoverer.
The students decided that if one item is buried deeper than another item, it must be older. Pretty smart!
The students collected our finds in these boxes to inspect them and make theories about what they were used for.
Here are the notes taken by one of the second-grade archaeologists about what was found in their dig. Note the
In my own homeroom of 3rd and 4th graders today we did a lesson about how the first people came to North America.
"Columbus sailed here!" explained one.
"There was someone before Columbus."
"The Vikings came earlier!"
"Someone way before that."
One student knew all about the Bering Land Bridge already.
"A long time ago, the water was lower because it was an ice age and the people walked across between Russia and Alaska."
We had fun imagining the ancient creatures - now extinct - who once roamed North America. There were giant, slow, ground sloth (easy pickings for early hunters, we decided), horses, camels, bison and mammoth ("hairy, American elephants," we called them). We found a neat National Geographic from the 1960s with a picture showing an Inuit family sleeping on furs in an igloo and wondered if the people whose tools we'll search for this summer lived anything like that.
Students jot down notes about the theory of the Bering Land Bridge - a possible explanation of how people first got to what is now North America. Researchers believe lower sea levels during the ice ages made a land journey between what are now Russia and Alaska possible. Note the mammoth in the upper right who also made the journey!
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