A lesson in archaeology

So today we did the activity part of SOTW history. The activity was supposed to be an "archaelogical dig" however, it snowed yesterday and it's below freezing here today. The ground is a big hard rock to dig in. So, instead of burying objects outside to dig up, I put them in a bag and pretended I had dug them up and brought them back for further study.

The point of the activity was to dig up objects and look at them and hypothesize what humans did with the objects and what importance they held to people. We decided we were green aliens from the Planet Z and humans no longer existed on earth anymore. We were making explorations to earth to discover more about the people who used to live there. So I had a ceramic bowl, a metal spoon, a pencil and a toy car. We looked at each item and discussed why we thought it was used for the purpose the kids chose. We realized the spoon was really too small to be a shovel, and it made a bad mirror since our reflection was upside down (I guess that would be a science lesson. heh). We noticed writing on the bottom of the bowl and realized we could go back to earth to search for books because humans must have had a system of writing. The toy car not only showed us that cars were probably a form of transportation, they were an important part of our culture since they were decorated (this was a funked up hotwheel car) so we must take pride in our transportation and also it was valued enough to become a toy for children as well. I kind of asked leading, open ended questions for them to come to some of their conclusions. We actually found out all kind of stuff about humans based on what we found- from our use of metal to make the spoon, to the paint on the bowl and the perfection of its manufacture (it must have been made with some sort of machine rather than handcrafted?). All in all, we had lots of fun and learned a lot. I was planning on taking pictures, but there really wasn't anything to photograph, since we were just sitting in the middle of our carpet and holding rather mundane objects.

I'll take pictures of our science experiment tomorrow. We'll observe several things close up and make conclusions based on our observations. We're learning that everything is made up of atoms right now. We started the Chemistry curriculum yesterday and read the first chapter of our textbook and talked about how everything was made of atoms. Ariel spent the whole day walking around pointing to things and saying "That has atoms in it!" It was cute.