Message from dlong

[Anonymous]

I took my 6th grade class to the Skirball Museum for an Archaeology field trip several months ago. While the topic of this trip was Archaeology I found that it helped later in the year when we were discussing artifacts from Asia.

In order to have the opportunity to take this field trip I had to attend a workshop at the Skirball Museum last summer. At this session I was infomed of the process to sign up for the trip, get a bus scholorship, and was given a tour of the exhibits my students would see. I attended a workshop in mid-August and found that they were already booked through the end of March, so attend an earlier workshop if you woudl like to take the field trip earlier in the year.

The trip was for 6th grade and specifically addressed the topic of Archaeology and how artifacts are discovered and studied. One week prior to coming to the museum I picked up their kit with activities that would better prepare the students for the field trip. It took me several hours to read the directions and activity binder and sort through all the pieces before I could realistically devise a plan to carry out the activities. Because of the time restrictions on having the kit and scheduling conflicts at my school there was only one day that I could do these activities. I made all the photo copies several days in advance and came early the day of the lessons to stage the stations. I could not set up the stations until just before my 3rd period class because I teach art in the morning. I recruited several responsible students to help me set up during our nutrition break. The preparation and set up for this activity was somewhat stressful and time-consuming, but I found that it paid off.

I gave each student a packet with all of the activity sheets rather than set them at each station. There were 10 stations so I had groups of 4 students rotate whenever they finished and another station opened. Some activites took only a couple of minutes, others took long periods of time. Because of this some students did up to 6 activities while others worked only on two or three. I wish I could have had several days to do these activites and would encourage anyone else who does these activities to schedule accordingly. The students really enjoyed the stations. These included instruction and practice in identifying the oldest to newest version of oil lamps, using code cracking skills to translate ancient languages, and matching artifacts to written documents that described them.

The field trip itself was generally good. While it was short, it was informative and memorable. The first part of the trip included looking at ancient artifacts that were organized from oldest to newest. The docent would hold up a modern object such as a cup and have students point out all the artifacts that once servd the same purpose. My students enjoyed this "guessing game".

The second and most memorable part of this trip was the archaeological dig. Outside there were five sand pits that had various artifacts buried in them. Students were given brief instructions on how to dig for objects and then were allowed to go for it. It was obvioulsy a popular activity. Students found various replications of statues, pottery, coins, tools, and a writing tablet. Upon uncovering the writing tablet one girl exclaimed, "I found the 10 commandments!" She was quite thrilled by this, even when the discussion portion revealed it was a replica of a legal record. After 15 minutes or so of digging there was a docent led discussion of what all the various artifacts were and what they told us about the civilization they had once belonged to.

This field trip was brought up many times the rest of the year during our history class. While the field trip did not specifically address education on Asia, we used our knowledge of archaeology to help us better study Asian artifacts in our units on ancient China and India.