Saturday, September 26, 2009

Olivia's Archaelogical Dig

We started reading The Story Of The World with Olivia this weekend and part of the introduction talked about Archaeology. Rebecca had the great idea of doing a dig with her, so I set it up and did it with her on Saturday.

I put a 50lb bag of sand in a rubbermaid storage container and buried a bunch of items in the sand for her to find. I buried some coins, a couple of foam letters, a ball, a necklace, a fork, and a key. I also buried a toy soup can and an empty yogurt container. The point of the items was to give a cross-section of different things we use everyday; the things we eat, wear, play with, etc.

We divided the dig into 4 sections and labeled them.

Olivia then would dig out a shovelful of sand...

put it into a sifter and sift through it (into another container) to see if she found anything.

Every time she found something, we would stop and make a note of what we found and which section it was in.
When it was all done, she asked if we could do it every day. She had such a great time and it was a great introduction into the world of history and archaeology.