Middle School Science Blog

New for 2016 – to see the older version with additional lesson details, please visit my post from last year.

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Before starting the activity, I set the stage that they are a group of archeologists and have discovered an ancient tablet at an archeological dig site. Unfortunately, the tablet is broken and as they excavate, they only find a few pieces at a time. What does the ancient table say? Scientists all over the world try to decipher the ancient text…

Materials:

• Original Worksheet: (pdf)
• Worksheet to compare posters (Google Doc)
• Words to cut apart (pdf) – this year I removed the word “bone” to change it up a little
• construction paper
• white paper cut into 1/4ths or small index cards
• glue sticks
• colored pencils

This year, I wanted to try something different for this lesson. Instead of seeing how close each group came to the original phrase that was on the “tablet”, I wanted each group to analyze the findings from the other groups to compare their findings and look for similarities and differences. This would be similar to a gallery walk (see video below) but without students explaining their posters, they would view posters at their own pace and choose any 3 posters to compare for each category.

Note – this lesson plan is a modification of the original lesson plan from The University of California Museum of Paleontology (link)