Teacher's Guides > Investigating
Artifacts
Archaeology and Exploring Your Roots
Do People Grow on Family Trees?: Genealogy for
Kids and Other Beginners
Mitzi and Frederick the Great
Motel of the Mysteries
My Backyard History Book
Skara Brae: The Story of a Prehistoric Village
Who Do You Think You Are?: Digging for Your Family Roots
Who Put the Cannon in the Courthouse Square: A Guide
to Uncovering the Past
Do People Grow on Family Trees?:
Genealogy for Kids and Other Beginners
by Ira Wolfman; illustrated by Michael Klein
Workman Publishing Co., New York. 1991
Grades: 512
The chapter Ancestor Detector tells how to trace family
records, find documents, and includes general background material on
American immigration and family names. With many photographs and short
articles, this book is slickly designed to grab the reader. In the Paper
Chase chapter, some of these short articles are useful such as
keeping dates straight, that old-time handwriting,
the mystery of the missing days, and using the sounds
of Soundex about an indexing code for names used by the government.
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Mitzi and Frederick the Great
by Barbara Williams; illustrated by Emily A. McCully
E.P. Dutton, New York. 1984
Grades: 59
Humorous fictional account of the summer Mitzi spends with her mother
and brother Frederick on an archaeological dig in Chaco Canyon, one
of the most important Native American historical sites. While much of
the book is about the family dynamics of Mitzi and her brother, there
is accurate information on archeology and its techniques.
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Motel of the Mysteries
by David Macaulay
Houghton Mifflin, Boston. 1979
Grades: 6Adult
Presupposing that all knowledge of our present culture has been
lost, an amateur archeologist of the future discovers clues to the lost
civilization of Usa from a supposed tomb, Room #26 at the
Motel of the Mysteries, which is protected by a sacred seal (Do
Not Disturb sign). For older students, this cleverly illustrated
archaeological satire is a particularly apt accompaniment to the midden
activities. Students construct their own inferences based on evidence
from their middens, myths, and masks. Motel of the Mysteries is an elaborate
and logically constructed train of inferences based on partial evidence,
within a pseudo-archaeological context. Reading this book, whose conclusions
they know to be askew, can encourage students to maintain a healthy
and irreverent skepticism about their own and others inferences
and conclusions, while providing insight into the intricacies and pitfalls
of the reasoning involved.
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My Backyard History Book
by David Weitzman; illustrated by James Robertson
Little, Brown & Co., Boston. 1975
Grades: 412
A do-it-yourself history primer with activities and projects for
tracing your own roots. Create a birthday time capsule, be creative
with family photographs using a photocopy machine, make a family map,
record family activities and memories through photography, oral history,
or gravestone rubbings. Emphasizes the theme that the past is all around
you and history is more than just dates.
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Skara Brae: The Story of a Prehistoric Village
by Olivier Dunrea
Holiday House, New York. 1985
Grades: 48
This book describes a stone age settlement preserved almost intact
in the sand dunes of one of the Orkney Islands, how it came to be discovered
in the mid-nineteenth century, and what it reveals about the life and
culture of this prehistoric community. Learning about the archaeological
aspects of this discovery sheds light on archaeological techniques that
students practice in the GEMS midden activities.
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Who Do You Think You Are?:
Digging for Your Family Roots
by Suzanne Hilton
Westminster Press, Philadelphia. 1976
Out of print
Grades: 6Adult
Describes how to do primary and secondary research, to construct
a family tree, and to find problem records for immigrants,
adopted children, Native Americans or black slave ancestors, with the
example of Alex Haley and his research for the Roots series.
The author advocates looking at history in a new way, history made by
your own people.
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Who Put the Cannon in the Courthouse Square:
A Guide to Uncovering the Past
by Kay Cooper; illustrated by Anthony Accardo
Walker and Co., New York. 1985
Grades: 5Adult
How to research local history, not just people, but landmarks, battles,
accidents and natural disasters, cemeteries, and other secret places.
Chapters describe how to do research at libraries, museums, and interview
people. An appendix includes a summary of three secondary school local
history projects.
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