Artifact Bags!

This week our class had a variety of discussions about how and why students must learn about history. One of the most important and valued answer to these questions is essentially to know our past to see our future. What this means is students must learn and research the history of their country, families, and the world to further understand progression and the mistakes that others have made. This is an exact example of learning that history repeats itself.

On Wednesday, Dr. Smirnova broke the class into groups and we all were given the opportunity to be researchers! She provided each group with an artifact bag. None of the bags consisted of the same items, however, each bag had specific and important belongings from Russia. Each group had to research what these items were. We created a chart using the 5 W's: Who/What/When/Where/Why. As investigators in my group we researched the Russian alphabet to try and read what some of our items had written. This was such an amazing experience for me because I find it fascinating to study people, belongings, and the past. It was a wonderful opportunity to not only learn many new and interesting facts about Dr. Smirnova, but also to learn some of the traditions and ways of both the past and present Russia.


Now it was our turn to create our own artifact bags that related to our unit plan. For my group's unit plan we are connecting learning with economics and the BizMovie project we completed with the fourth grade class. Everyone in the group was to find different artifacts from a movie of choice and everyone else in the group would guess what the movie was and what the artifacts represented. The movie that I chose was The Mighty Ducks. This is movie was released in October 1992. The artifacts that I placed in my bag was a picture of the a movie reel and popcorn to represent the movie making process and the industry. My second and third artifacts were pictures of the front of the Mighty Duck's jersey and one of the player's jerseys. I decided to place this into my bag because it represents the profit that can be collected during and after a movie is relseased. Most people just think that the money the movie makes at the box office is it's complete profit. However, movies and movie companies release shirts, jerseys, dolls, lunch boxes, and many more knick knacks that represent and advertise the film. The final artifact that I placed in my bag was fifty small dollar sign confetti pieces. I decided to place the specific number fifty into the bag because the profit for this movie was fifty million dollars.

Together as a group Melodie, Cynthia, Megan, and I dug through each other's bags to guess which movie was what and whose it was. Melodie chose Alice in Wonderland, Cynthia chose Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Megan chose Bambi and Mr. Ed. It was really fun to guess each others artifacts and to find our everyone's reasons for choosing the artifacts and the movies. This was a great project to take part in!

This is a picture of my artifacts:

These are our artifact bags!

Here is Cynthia, Megan, Melodie, and my artifacts:

 A final collage created by Megan from our artifact bag activity: