Mill Road Elementary School
Collaboration with Bard College Archaeology
Archaeological Site Visits and Workshops on Prehistoric Tools Lead to Projects in the Classroom for Fourth Grade Students
The Bard College Archaeology Program joined together with fourth grade teachers at Mill Road Elementary School in Red Hook, New York in 1998. Students visited the Grouse Bluff archaeological site and participated in outdoor activities. Teachers and students then followed up with projects in the classroom so they could use what they learned.
Going Outdoors, Reflecting on the Past
Professor Lindner tells the students a story about the Lenape people. View Bigger.
In spring 1998, each fourth grade class at Mill Road Elementary School visited the Grouse Bluff prehistoric site. 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.
Students take a look at an excavation at the Grouse Bluff site. See More Pictures.
In fall 1998, 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.
After visiting the dig, the Bard students returned to the school and worked with each fourth 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.
Students try cracking walnuts with stone tools. See More Pictures.
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 curricular plan was 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.
Students' Stories and Drawings
Fall 1998
More 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.
This web site was created in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for Bard College course Anthropology 111,
Field Methods in Archaeology.
Updated by ulster.net June, 1999.
Updated 2007 by Bard College Archaeology.