It’s back to school, which brings fall sports like football and volleyball, but it is also when the pennant races in baseball start to get really interesting. I’m going to steal a line from baseball to describe how my Social Studies class got it’s start. We are going back, back, back, back, back, way back to about 200 million years ago. It all started, well my class, with the five important Early Hominids and how scientists learned from them. We discussed how they adapted over time and invented tools to make a better life for themselves. The last group we studied left behind their history in cave drawings discovered in Lascaux, France. This lead to us taking a field trip as well, but not to a real cave, we used well something a little different, but it gave us the same feel. We crawled into our cave (the Star Lab) and observed and discussed the paintings that were left 11,000 to 18,000 years ago by Early Hominids. The discussion the class had about what was painted and why it was painted helped us understand how scientist piece together history and also gave us a better understanding of their culture. This lead us to a fun discussion and activity. What images would we paint on “our caves” today for future generations to find. What are the things we find most important in our society. Students then wrote about what they felt was most important to our society and left it in a 21st century drawing. The drawing that we decided to use that would best describe our 21st century was a QR code. Here is an example of one that I did for this site and for the students. I will post some student QR codes on this site for you to check them out.
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