Artifact Bag

Today in class we learned about Artifact Bags! As we broke up into our fieldwork groups, Dr. Smirnova explained to us what Artifact Bags were and then provided each individual group an artifact bag that was full of little surprises that many of us had never seen before. When I reached my hand into the bag I pulled out and unwrapped an artifact called a nesting doll. This was something I have never seen before and I was amazed at how beautiful these nesting dolls were and all of the beautiful colors that stood out to me.The dolls came apart, every time you opened one there was another one inside, there was a total of five by the time we opened all of them. We then looked up some information about nesting dolls online since many of us have never seen them before and wanted to know what they represent. As we continued to open the Artifact bags we discovered a number of different objects inside. We opened up a small plate/ dish that had a pretty blue color on it and we looked up what these were used for as well, it was tiny and fragile but had beautiful designs on it too. There was also a booklet inside of the bag that we opened up, we were not quite sure what this booklet meant because some of it was written in Russian, but we were determined to find out. After some translating websites we were able to find out what this booklet represented. It was a certificate in teaching that was awarded to Dr. Smirnova.  This was an award she had received in Russia and she has it to show us today, which I found to not only be awesome but very interesting and rewarding as well. After we were finished discovering what was inside of our Artifact Bag we needed to come up with a conclusion, why were these pieces in the bag? who could have this bag belonged too? When we were done observing we came to the conclusion that this bag belonged to Dr. Smirnova and she was the one who had filled this bag with all of these interesting and unique artifacts!  After we discussed what we had figured out and gone over in class it was now our turn to go home and create our own individual artifact bags that we would be able to share with the class. We all put different artifacts into our bags, my bag consisted of money, shoes and gold/ jewelry. These were all things that could be bought at a market throughout the medieval times. Along with creating my artifact I also had to create a slide on my groups powerpoint presentation, my slide included information and pictures on what was in my bag, what the importance of it was, and I also picked websites and books that I thought would be informative to children about this topic. My Artifact bag looked like it was from the middle ages by the time I was done burning that paper to give it that rustic  look. After having our bags created we also worked in different groups to talk about and try to guess what they had in their bags and what the meaning behind all of it was. I thought this was a great interactive assignment. It was fun and it also provided us with information and gave us background knowledge on artifacts and different things from the middle ages. I would love to use this assignment in my classroom one day, its quick, easy, fun and engaging, what more could you ask for?