Acera Blog

Room 8 Blog Post: Trip to the Museum!

By January 17, 2024No Comments

Last week’s field trip to Harvard’s Peabody Museum was awesome, but due to the excellent teacher there extending the Farmers to Foragers program (due to the high level of engagement and excellent questions and comments from the class), we had very little time to explore the exhibits in the museum and there are some that are highly relevant to our curriculum as well as just lots of cool stuff so … we’re going back!

Students expressed interest in: more time to explore the museum galleries (specifically Mayan Exhibit, Rocks and Minerals,  sea creatures, other Native American cultures exhibits), time to sketch the animals, and visiting the Museum of the Ancient Museum of the Near East across the street. We plan to do all of this on our second trip- as well as some structured activities, some in each building.

Liked: the stuffed animals, camels, African serval, ocelots, the octopus, the cool live horseshoe crab (from The Changing Earth program, see photo), making imprints in the leather (Hands- on part of Foragers to Farmers, see photos), everything!

Learned about: 3 types of rocks, that metamorphic rocks are kind of strange because they are made out of other rocks and they are changed by pressure and heat, that marble is metamorphic rock, that marble is made from limestone, that horseshoe crabs are slimy, what the earth looked like millions of years ago, that ancient peoples had lots of cool inventions, and that “ancient people were smarter than me” – we followed up that last one and distinguished between smart (ability to learn and use info) vs knowledgeable (knows something specific- like how to identify edible plants).
We had an interesting discussion of the effects of different consequences of various inventions, for example, smart phones mean many of us don’t know many phone numbers by heart 🙂
Food: Thank you Ms. Queenie for the presentation on pine nuts this Wednesday. I passed around some pinenuts in their shells and promised I’d buy some so we could taste them as well as try cracking mine (I only have 4). There’s also some interest in doing some “ancient” cooking in class – lentils and chickpeas and cornmeal and maple syrup are the things I’m thinking about – perhaps with some extras (like onion  (also ancient Mesopotamian) in the lentils). If there are any dietary constraints or other concerns that you want me to be aware of, please contact me directly. Just to be clear, no one needs to try any food they don’t want to!