Story of the World: Introduction

Mentioned before, as are using Story of the World Vol. 1 for our history this year.  This covers nomads through the last Roman empire.  Each chapter has activities to complete and I love things that are hands on so I thought I would share some of what we do.

The introduction is all about what history is and how we learn about it.  A big focus is on archeology.  Some books we read in addition to story of the world include Me and My Family Tree and Archaeologists Dig for Clues.  Both books were really informative and Green Bubbles listened to both but between the two, the archaeologist book was perfect since we did an archaeology activity to go along with the introduction.

 I have to admit, I never thought our garden box would have been used for school purposes but this is the second time we've used it for that!  I buried some objects in our garden box that represented our culture.  What did I bury?  A fork, knife (dull so fingers wouldn't be cut), a letter W, coins, a toy car, and a comb.  There's all sorts of things that could work as well though.

The first thing I did was divide the area we were going to dig into four squares using pencils and embroidery floss.  Why floss?  Because it was the closest thing I had on hand to string and I have a lot of it! 

We then talked about the book we read and how the archeologist are very gentle and take only a little bit of dirt at a time when looking for things.  This was a very hard concept for Green Bubbles and I don't think he really got it.  It's just way to much fun digging in deep and throwing dirt all around!

Once we found something I had Green Bubbles take it out and clean it off.  We had an empty squirt bottle that I filled with water and an old tooth brush we weren't going to use again.  Green Bubbles loved squirting everything off with the bottle and I think he used the tooth brush once just to humor me.

After our artifacts were cleaned off Little Miss jumped in to help.  She took all the cleaned artifacts and put them in baggies.  Little Miss the Little Helper!

While all of this was going on, I showed Green Bubbles the paper I made to log everything we found.  I drew a map of our dig area and below it a list of everything we found.  This was shown in the book as well and we talked about how important it was to keep records when doing science.  Even though this was history, it totally counts as science too!

Of course, I know there are still things out there in my garden bed.  Namely, coins.  Green Bubbles was able to find all the bigger objects and eve the quarters, but pennies and nickels were just too elusive with the big holes and thrown dirt!