Archaeology and the Common Core: Bay Farm School and UC Berkeley

Summary

Archaeology provides an amazing vehicle for teaching the Common Core and engaging students in lessons across the curricula, while emphasizing teaching for deep understanding of big ideas or broad concepts. Social sciences, history, and science easily find avenues for collaboration, while students use language arts and math skills to analyze and apply data, as well as to write reports. Archaeological inquiry may be used to understand the human past, employing such tools as observation, inference, context, evidence and chronology, as well as to inform us about contemporary problems. Especially significant is the opportunity to teach cultural sensitivity and to learn about the former inhabitants of one’s own region: how these people met basic human needs, such as food and shelter. Seventh grade students at Bay Farm School learned the basics of archaeological inquiry through Project Archaeology and got some first-hand experience at local archaeological sites which have been excavated by UC Berkeley; this paper presents the results of their investigations.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Project Archaeology Makes a Difference: The Next 25 Years   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage