Glenn Weibe was blogging about Artifacts on his website and this is what he wrote "Our history and social studies classes need to be structured around the central idea that we’ll be using evidence to solve problems all year long. Encourage this idea from the very first day with a variety of mysteries and problems to mess with.
One of the simplest ways to do this is called History in a Bag. Purchase or find enough brown paper bags for all of your students. Write a number on each bag and give one to every kid. Ask them to place five personal items into the bag, close it and to remember the number (for identification later). These items can be anything in their pockets, backpack, etc. Place all of the bags in a pile and have the students select one at random.
Provide a series of questions that they will answer as they attempt to decipher these “artifacts.” Is this person male or female? What does this person value? How old is this person? Where do they live? The questions aren’t so important as the rationale used to answer the question. You want kids to start thinking about how we know what we know, to start to understand the historical process.
Have students get into groups of two or three to explain their answers. As a large group, ask kids to identify the owners of their bag’s artifacts. Lead a discussion about historical process and how we know what we know."
Mr. Roughton does a similar lesson except he makes up the Artifact himself. He does this as a first lesson of the semester. To see his lesson click here.
This will be my last post until the start of 2nd semester on February 3rd. Good luck on your exams.
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