Mill Road Elementary School / Bard College Collaboration

Prof. Lindner telling a story about the Lenape (Click on image to see larger photo)

Each 4th Grade class visited the Grouse Bluff prehistoric site in spring 1998. After viewing the excavations, the children listened to a retelling of two Lenape myths, the first about the origin of stories and the second about a little person named Answer Me, or Echo. The children then closed their eyes and listened to sounds of the forest environment, while imagining Lenape people living at the site.

Next, pairs of children received stone tools and interpreted them by pencil drawings of the artifacts in use on the site. Back at school, each child finished a picture with more drawing and coloring. Finally, the children wrote stories about the pictures.

(Click on image to see more pictures)

Last fall, the children did these same activities after they had dug for half an hour in teams of three or four, each with one of eight Bard students. Classroom workshops, run by Bard students, prepared the children for digging. The workshops taught them how to trowel for artifacts and record measurements to locate discoveries.

Students using stone tools to crack walnuts (Click on image to see more pictures)

After visiting the dig, the Bard students returned to the school and worked with each 4th grade class. The playground was the scene of a laboratory exercise where the children used replicas of stone tools to crack walnuts. They also examined flint flake knives with high-power magnifying glasses and drew pictures of the wear on flint knives caused by cleaning fish.

Finally, there was a written evaluation by the children, which included drawings of an archaeologist at work, short answers to a series of questions, and an essay about ethics and stewardship.

The curriculum's plan is to have the children in each class make composite murals or models as dioramas, with the writing about each scene becoming a story for retelling or a dramatization for videotaping. More of the children's writing about archaeology appears in these pages.

Stories and Drawings by the 4th Graders

Ms. Val Borges's 4th Grade Class
Stories and Drawings, Fall 1998

Mrs. Mary Chenenert's 4th Grade Class
Stories and Drawings, Fall 1998

Mrs. Andrea Clark's 4th Grade Class
Stories and Drawings, Fall 1998

Mrs. Donaldson's 4th Grade Class
Stories and Drawings, Fall 1998

Ms. Sandra Hinkey's 4th Grade Class
Stories and Drawings, Fall 1998

Mr. Ray Juliano's 4th Grade Class
Stories and Drawings, Fall 1998

Mrs. Wilson's 4th Grade Class
Stories and Drawings, Fall 1998

Additional Information about the Grouse Bluff Archaeological Site

Grouse Bluff: An Archaeological Introduction by Christopher R. Lindner Grouse Bluff is a fairly level promontory that overlooks Tivoli South Bay of the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains. A gradual slope drops to the nearly 5 kilometer long embayment that has highly diverse and seasonally rich resources of fish, turtles, shellfish, waterfowl, and aquatic plants. The bluff top is high enough to avoid dampness and mosquitoes, and may have been particularly comfortable because of its well-drained sandy earth in an area where clay soils predominate.