A Day at The Rooms

Hands-on learning

I spent yesterday at The Rooms.  In the morning I did a flintknapping demonstration and worked with the grade 8 and 10 students attending the Open Minds program this week.  After the demo, the students selected one or more artifacts and described them at their desk.  They recorded how it was made, what materials it was made from, how it would have been used, and what culture and time period it belonged to.

Teacher's notes from the demo - wow!

They really seemed into the experience and they asked a steady stream of questions.  It was a great dialog and all the questions helped make the time fly.  With all the other interesting discussion that the class was generating, it was a challenge to get back to the knapping and finish the demonstration piece.

And once again, as soon as my part of the program was over, their school closed for an impending storm.  The students got to go home again right after their flintknapping and archaeology morning.  That's two for two.  The same thing happened two weeks ago when I was in for the Open Minds program.

Maritime Archaic Projectile Point from Bird Cove

At noon, I took my flintknapping boxes out to the car and came back in with my camera, books, and laptop to work down in the archaeology lab for the afternoon. I was going through the Maritime Archaic collections from Bird Cove again.  We're still plugging away on that paper and I had a few more questions about some of the artifacts.  It also gave me a chance to see some of the other Martime Archaic collections from other sites around the Province.  Sometime before the end of this fiscal year, I'll be doing a a set of Maritime Archaic reproductions for education kits at Port au Choix.  A few of the pieces are familiar, but others will be new for me, so I snapped a few reference photos that will help in their construction.  More on that later.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast