November 13, 2002
Students throw birthday bash for early man
Central Grade celebrates 30,000 years of history
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
"Happy birthday, early man!"
Throwing a bash for Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon and other early species of man can be a complicated endeavor: what to bring, what to serve and who to invite?
Students at Central Grade School's upper Montessori classroom solved these problems with extensive research, a sense of humor and a dollop of ingenuity.
Monday morning, fourth, fifth and sixth grade students in Mary Haley's class bestowed bones, apples and nuts, primitive tools, fire and cave drawings upon Brian Klauer, the school's assistant principal who was sitting in for early man.
Before handing over the gifts, which represented significant advances in man's development over the millennia, the students presented their reports on the phase of man they researched. Marching up the timeline from 30,000 years ago, students progressed from Australopithecus and Homo Habilis, both large and small, to Homo Erectus and Homo Sapiens.
Students also presented information on the Piltdown Man hoax, Java Man and the African Eve. Students learned that on a room-sized timeline, man has been present on Earth only the last half inch of history.
The unit on early man pulled in writing, research, anthropology, scientific classification and history. Students also compared and contrasted the lifestyles of hunters, gatherers and farmers, learning about living conditions and foods, rituals and tools. They also studied a variety of landforms of the Earth that could have affected man's development, researching and making sketches of them.
Haley created the unit to prompt her students to see early man as more than grunting cave men. This approach honors the teachings of Dr. Maria Montessori, she noted.
"The point that Dr. Montessori wanted to make is that we are individuals in a big timeline," Haley said. "It is a big, difficult step to get beyond 'me, cave man;' to see that they were sophisticated hunters who were brave enough to challenge the mastodons."
"Thirty thousand years ago, things began to move quickly, man could think, reason and hunt animals," she noted.
After the birthday presentation, students broke open 'rocks' that Haley made and dug in sand gridded like an archeological dig to find artifacts. They charted their finds from the dig, mostly arrowheads and bones Haley buried in the fish tank, just as archeologists would.
The unit and the party sparked the kids' interest in this early phase of human history.
"I learned a lot of things from everyone's reports, that Homo Erectus was the first to stand up and use fire," said Jay Meyers, a fifth-grade student whose research topic was the Piltdown Man. "I was surprised that there was evolution, I thought there was just Adam and Eve. I learned there was more to learn about man."
Liza McCloskey, a sixth-grade student, created a model of the ice age. She said the multiple tasks and learning opportunities really brought the information home.
"The project was fun and it is easier to learn when people present the information to you instead of looking it up in books," she said.
The next step for these time-traveling students is the future. Haley is challenging her students to think 20,000-30,000 years into the future for the next phase of their project.
"We're going to be putting on our thinking caps and looking at what it will be like," she said, after showing students an assortment of items from contemporary life and having them speculate about what future anthropologists would think of them.