1. Brainstorm words the students know about Early Humans and organize the words into general categories. KWL Chart: In SS journal, kids write down everything they can think of about Early Humans and civilizations.
2. Study about and create pictoral representations of camps, art, dress, weapons, etc. (extend to art class)
-Group activity: depicting Stone-Age life.
-Language Arts reading about the discoveries of the Lascaux Cave drawings
-Research projects, constructions of camps, cave art (by art teachers)
-Research project: how did they communicate, dress, and use weapons?
3. Writing news stories about Early Humans after a study of what is included in a news story.
-Five Ws of reporting: students write about the different discoveries of early humans.
4. - Use notes to draft an informational report, poster, or brochure on one species of early man.
- construct paragraphs for their informational reports.
- prepare a bibliography of all references cited, using standard bibliographic format.
- confer with a partner and a teacher to revise and adhere to initial drafts.
- prepare a final published copy of their report, brochure, or poster, saving their final copies on the school‚s server, a disk, or a memory stick.
- Mini-lesson on note-taking. Conduct library research, using books on reserve.
- Mini-lesson on writing an introduction to a paper. Writing workshop: students take the time to write their introductions.
5. - use a game and a discussion to demonstrate the importance of artifacts in context for learning about past people.
- use personal timelines and an activity sheet to: demonstrate the importance of intact artifacts to achieve accuracy and compare and contrast their timelines with the chronological information contained in a stratified archaeological site.
- worksheets: Boy in the Water, and An Ancient Coin; use to help students think about the difference between inference and observation ˆ skills used by archaeologists in their work. Share with the class.
- Students use a foreign coin and imagine they’ve found the coin at an archaeological site. Students create a list of observations and possible inferences about the coin.
- Students choose one inference and describe how to test it.
- Individually, students consider their bedrooms as archaeological sites and their possessions as artifacts. Using a worksheet, they consider, in
writing, what would happen if all of their special things were removed and scattered all around.
- UBC video about early humans ˆ compare and contrast how each group appears, dresses, uses technology
. - Kids develop rap songs to recount their understanding of the technological advancements of each group of early humans.
- archaeological dig; analysis and inferences of findings.
6. Students, in groups, create PowerPoint presentations about Early Humans.