From the Classroom

Year 3 Archaeology

By Abbey, Alice, Finn, and Georgia, Year 3

Clunk! 

Went one of the shovels diving headfirst into the soft, brown dirt. We had found something! It was curved but what was it? We kept digging. A flash of golden, glittering brown glass. It was a bottle!

Hello, today we will be telling you about North Melbourne’s archaeology dig. On Wednesday, 10th of June the day started as usual, but we all stared up at the whiteboard and the daily timetable and something new was up there. It said that we had ‘Archaeology’ on the timetable. We were all amazed.

First our teachers showed us what they had found on previous student digs . They had found horseshoes, bones, glass, pottery and even a gold ring! We then did some reading about what archaeology is and what archaeology has taught us about Melbourne.

The next day we went on a virtual excursion through Melbourne's CBD on Minecraft. In the game, we had to put on our PPE gear, and make sure we could always see the teacher before we headed off down Swanston Street. We then had to use our security passes to gain access to the dig site. We used tools to find artefacts that were buried under Melbourne's old buildings: I found an old die!

It was awesome to feel like we were on a real excursion, without leaving the classroom! I also loved that I could see parts of Melbourne that I recognised! I hope we get to do it again.

Next came the real dig. When Mike said that we were ‘digging at the dig site’, we had no idea what to expect. We walked to the oval and to our surprise there were gloves, shovels, trowels and sieves. We measured how far we were going to dig and then we started. We found lots of cool things like bones, glass, pottery and other things, including a bit of a possum’s jaw.

We then had to make little boxes for our most interesting finds, and measure them. We then added all this to reports to tell the archaeologists that Mike had been in touch with what we had found.

Finally, on Wednesday 17th June, a really nice archaeologist called Jen visited us on WebEx and she showed us some very old biscuits and also showed us lots of teeth from an old dentist at Swanston Street, where they’d dug up a thousand! She also showed us what tools she used when she was digging.

That is why we all love archaeology now!

From the Art Room

Year 1 and 2 students making faces with autumn leaves and white markers.