DAY ONE

Today we came together as a new group of year 3 and 4 students to begin a new Mantle of the Expert unit of work.  We are going to be archaeologists for this Mantle of the Expert Unit, so today we started developing an understanding about what archaeology is and the kinds of work an archaeologist does.

GATHERING IDEAS

First we gathered our ideas about what we knew as a group about archaeology already:

“They dig for treasure, especially diamonds”

“They dig or fossils and bones”

“They tag beetles so they can study their habitats”

“They look for old things like some tree sap that might have a bug caught in it – they can study the bug and see if it has some dinosaur blood in it”

“They look for ruins”

“They research other civilisations – a civilisation is basically the place we live in, the buildings and the government”

As you can see there was a range of ideas in the group.  We had a sense that archaeology was a kind of science that involved digging things up but we needed to find out some more about what exactly they dug up and studied.

Next we read a picture book called ‘Archaeologists Dig For Clues’ by Kate Duke, and this helped clarify our ideas.

Here is what we learnt from the book:

• We confirmed that archaeologists do dig things up and that archaeology is a type of science - they are very systematic, careful and organised with how they dig and record their findings!
• We learnt that archaeologists rarely find treasure and diamonds. 
• We discovered that archaeologists are actually more interested in ordinary things that belonged to ordinary people – in fact they even get excited about what they find in thousand year old rubbish piles! (archaeologists call old rubbish midden – and they can get clues about what people used to eat by looking at the little bits they left over!)
• We learnt that archaeologists study things that tell them about past human life.  The study of old dinosaur bones and old bugs is actually a different type of science called ‘palaeontology’. 
• Archaeologists do study past civilisations and they get clues from finding things that people made (artifacts): old tools, old artwork, old buildings, and things that were written down by past people. 
• The book also gave us some idea of the kinds of tools archaeologists use and the kind of work they do when they go on an excavation.

GETTING INTO ROLE

In our next activity we imagined we were archaeologists and we were heading out on an excavation.  We generated some ideas in pairs about what kinds of tools we might need to pack and then we did a small drama where we packed a van with the equipment we needed. 

“Its 8 o’clock in the morning and there is a group of people packing their van to get ready for going on an archaeological dig. I wonder what kind of things they are packing for their days work…some people are packing their own archaeology dig kits, some are putting bigger things into the van…it looks like it is going to be a warm day, we are going to need our sunhats and sun-block today for sure….”

The children in role 'packing the van' opening cupboards and taking things out carefully to carry to the van.

After a few minutes in role we froze and listened to each other speak aloud the things they were thinking or packing.

 “small brushes”

“lunch!”

“sunhat”

“screens for sieving the dirt”

“buckets”

“trowels”

“clipboard and paper”

“bags to put our finds in”

“a water bottle”

“string and pegs” (for marking out the squares for digging)

“rulers”

ARCHAEOLOGY DIG KITS

We made a collective list of the things we had packed in the van and then started work on drawing our own individual archaeology dig kits.

PICTURES FROM SOME KITS

We only had the afternoon today but we learnt lots! We are looking forward to a full day of Mantle of the Expert on Monday!