Post contain some affiliate links, though which I can earn commission.
We did separate lessons for each section of the introduction of
Story of the World - Ancient Times. For this lesson I prepared some visuals to illustrate the text using the book
Stone Age People and found something outside to "discover" as well related to archaeology.
Since we had previously done a lot of study of dinosaurs, I introduced the concept of archaeology by comparing it to paleontology, like this...
"Paleontologists
are people who study dinosaurs and look for dinosaur fossils. There
are other people that also dig in the dirt looking for very old things,
but they are not looking for dinosaur bones, they are looking for things
that people left a long time ago. They are called archaeologists.
They can find out things about history even if it wasn't written down."
Then we watched the 1 minute video
National Geographic Kids: Archelogy Part 1.
It's short, and leaves off like it's going to go to the next video, but
that was sort of ideal for this lesson (I couldn't figure out which
YouTube video was next in that series anyways. There are some other
videos about the Egyptians and Mayans that were probably part of that
film, but I'm saving those for when we get to those parts.)
Then
we turned to
Story of the World. I skipped the first paragraph (first two in the revised version), since the video and my
intro had covered that. I asked my son to close his eyes and try to
imagine things as I read...but after the first couple sentences he was
saying he couldn't. So, impromptu, I grabbed some blank paper and a
pencil and drew out a couple houses and a river, some scratch marked
grass and some stick people from the story, and continued. He was able
to listen then, and even asked some of the stick people to talk to him
(that's his thing...we rarely read a book where SOMETHING on the page
doesn't have a conversation with him).
When we got to
the place where the grain dried up and the people moved, he got really
sad about them, and I ended up adding another impromptu part where the
family found a nice place to live with lots of rain further down the river, and
the little boy grew up and had a family of his own.
Then
we got to the part about the archaeologist finding the place the family had left. After reading the first
few sentences I pulled out the book I had borrowed from library,
Stone Age People
and turned it to the page where there was a picture of an
archaeological dig. I only needed to tweak the SOTW text a little bit to fit the picture (for
instance, in OUR STORY he didn't just come back with tools...but brought
people to help him). My son asked about the round object with a hole in it towards the bottom of the picture and I
told him it was an oven and that that's how they knew they had found the
kitchen of the house. The broken pottery on the table I said were
pieces of the pot the mother in the story broke.
This
worked really well...my son was able to pay attention much better with the
pictures in front of him, and he asked lots of questions about what he
saw.
THEN, I had a surprise for my son. Earlier this week I
found some broken bricks in a corner of our yard...probably something
the builders had left before we came. So I told him that I had found
something in our yard...something from people who were here before we
were, just like the archaeologist in the story. He got excited about
that, and we went and looked at what I'd found and tried to figure out
why it might have been there.
If you don't have any real life "artifacts" for your children to find in your yard the archaeology dig suggestion in the
Activity Book sounds like great fun (though a bit time consuming to set up.)
Suggested Resources
Some of these I used in our lesson, and others we didn't,
but they would also make wonderful supplements.
VIDEOS:
National Geographic Kids: Archelogy Part 1 - INTRO (1:02 min) -
Video I Used
(See all videos in this series
here. Some you might want to save for later....or could view now as a preview of what's to come. Egypt, China, Pompeii)
Bible Adventures in the Holy Land: Archaelogy (13:26 min)
Talks
about how archaeology is used to learn more about the Bible. (NOTE:
There's an appeal for donations at the end you can skip (starts about
minute 11:20), but it has a lot of neat pictures of the Holy Land in the
background so you may just turn the sound down and keep watching.
ACTIVIES:
Broken Pot Activity
Many things archaeologists find are broken. You can decorate a terra cotta pot with paint or markers, then break it in a
pillowcase and try to put it together.
You could also write on it with any ancient script, as broken pottery was the "paper" of commoners in many ancient society, and also what students would practice writing on (this is an activity we did later for
Chapter 3 though, so you might want to save that activity).
You could combine this with the
activity suggested in
Story of the World for a fake "archaeological
dig" with area divided by ropes by putting the pieces of the pot in this
area (maybe even tossing the pot into the area to break it, then
covering with dirt), but to simplify you could do this activity inside if you prefer, just doing the reconstruction and not the "finding." If you are using the
Stone Age People book, as I did in the lesson above, it also has a section that explains techniques archaeologists use when reconstructing pottery (pg 60-61).
Archeology Layer CakeThis is a fun activity mimicking a dig that DOESN'T involve digging up your yard.
AIA Lesson Plans
There are some more wonderful lesson plans aimed at older students (upper elementary through high school) with great activities at the Archaeological Institute of America.
Junior Archeologist WorkbookA free archeologist workbook through the National Park Service. If you compete the book you can mail or email it in to receive a Junior Archeologist patch.
BOOKS:
Stone Age People
We used this book to illustrate this chapter and the following one "The Earliest People." It has excellent information about what we have learned about the daily life of early peoples from archaeology, illustrated with dioramas and children in costumes, and has many great crafts and even a recipe for kids to make. Only a couple pages are specifically about archaeology though.
NOTE: The beginning of this book covers evolution.
The 5,000 Year Old Puzzle
While we saved this book for a later chapter (it also fits well with the chapters on Egypt), this book would make a great supplement for this chapter as well. The story about a boy who accompanies his family on an archaeological dig draws on real records from a 1920's dig by famed Egyptologist Dr. George Reisner, and includes both drawn illustrations and photographs related to the actual historical events this story includes.
This post has been shared on
Throwback Thursday.
