Living History

Stone Dagger

As we began the Living History project our focus started on Neolithic peoples. After a bit of research on ancient artifacts from this time period found around the globe, students were tasked with creating stone tools, using stones and methods the ancient people would have. I decided to create an obsidian dagger using a bone for the handle and creating a divot in the top for my blade to slide into, then securing the connection with rope. I also detailed the process of the construction on the attached poster.

Modifying Nature

As we learned about early peoples and the progression of society one of the important topics we learned about was the ways humans altered different species and other elements of nature through selective breeding and the cultivation of certain attributes. For this project I decided to focus on corn, a crop domesticated and loved by the ancient Mesoamerican people, even pre-dating their major civilizations. Click on the picture to see the document close up.

Baking & Farming

One of the activities we engaged in to better understand the lives of ancient people was baking pizza and bread, and growing the wheat to make it. While both my group's pizza turned out relatively good, unfortunately we put way too much salt in our bread, and our wheat farm went rather neglected and subsequently died.

Stone Tablet

As we moved onto Mesolithic and Bronze era, and started to learn about early civilizations, one important element we focused on was written language, including ancient hieroglyphics and cuneiform. As a class we created our own written hieroglyphics and cuneiform meant to resemble those used by ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Then, in groups of two, we chose "words of wisdom" we had a personal connection with. Both partners then created a clay tablet and took turns engraving the English and cuneiform versions of the wise words, and later painting the hieroglyphic versions onto. We then wrote a short paragraph about our connection to the words, and another about what ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian people would have thought of them. Click on the picture to get a better image of the tablet display.

Camping Experience

One of the biggest activities we had in this project was the overnight camping field trip. The trip was meant to give us real life experience to relate to the lives of ancient peoples. On the trip students cut wood, tested their stone tools, started fire using primitive methods, and slept under the stars. On the second day we even visited a valley where the native Kumeyaay people once lived. The site even still had petroglyphs and grinding holes estimated to be up to 2,000 years old.

Ancient Civilization Book

As we moved onto the classical era we chose one of four civilizations to study, Ancient Greece, China, India, or Mesoamerica. I chose to focus on Mesoamerica. Over the course of around 3 weeks we studied our civilization's climate, philosophy , architecture, and art. Eventually we organized our learning into a book detailing different aspects of our civilization.

Math History Portrait

Another product we created to represent our chosen civilizations was math history portraits. The idea was to create a portrait of a famous mathematician from the civilization and create a portrait of them along with a short paragraph about them and their feats. Unfortunately for Mesoamerica however a lot of their history was erased and lost when the conquistador's invaded their land, so instead I created a portrait depicting the Mayan calendar, which the Mayan's used to track important events such as weddings, sacrifices, and other ceremony's.

Metal Casting

In Physics we casted metal coins by melting down pennies. The coins were meant to represent ancient currency and we measured things like waste, heat transfer, etc. and created a lab report around them.

Catapult

To represent medieval siege weapons we built various different types of catapults in physics. Our catapult, the "Battle Ballista" took about 3 weeks to design and construct. The weapon fires belegarth javelins and was actually used on a professional battlefield. Click here to see more

Exhibition

To exhibit our learning this semester we put on a play performance representing all the civilizations we learned about this semester. The play followed a history teacher who begins to see human representations of the civilizations in his head, as they take him on a journey throughout time. After the performance parents were shown the different products created for this project, and toured though four different tables, each containing artifacts representing an ancient civilization.

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