The Intriguing Past: Fundamentals of Archaeology. A Teacher's Guide for Fourth through Seventh Grades.

This document is extracted from a larger work that is a component of Utah's archaeology education program. The goal of the project is educating students to take responsible and thoughtful actions with respect to our archaeological heritage. The document consists of eight lessons on the following topics: (1) why is the past important?; (2) culture everywhere; (3) observation and inference; (4) context; (5) chronology: the time of my life; (6) classification and attributes; (7) scientific inquiry; and (8) "it's in the garbage." Each identifies the subjects in which the lesson could be included such as science, social studies, and language arts. Each lesson lists the skills that will be learned in the lesson including knowledge, comprehension, analysis, application, synthesis, and evaluation. Learning strategies include brainstorming, observation, classification, comparing and contrasting, research skills, categorizing, discussion, scientific inquiry, decision making, problem solving, writing, games, analogy, and forecasting. Each lesson lists its approximate duration and recommended class size. The lessons are illustrated and include activity sheets that can be copied to be handed out to the students, answer keys for the sheets, lists of materials needed for that lesson, and a vocabulary list. The first lesson helps students to begin to discover why people study the past. The other lessons explore how to study the past. Background information, instructions for setting the stage for the lesson, the procedure to be followed in the lesson, closure, evaluation, and each lesson's links to other lessons are included. (DK)