We have a new Archaeology lesson available! Our first lesson was about an important artifact: pottery. This new lesson is about how we go about finding these material remains: excavation.

Students at Tuscaloosa Magnet School Elementary got to excavate boxes of sand that had artifacts, fossils, and other items in them. 
This is an easy lesson to set up because all you need is sand, something to hold the sand, and things to put in the sand that kids can dig up! 
Access our downloadable content here.
If you don't have access to downloads, click here.

We've added three lesson plans that are available for quick access. These can be accessed by those who can't access downloadable content or those working on a tablet. 

Click on the lesson titles to access them:
Seeing Culture
Playful Primates
Evolution

We hope that these additions are helpful. Please feel free to comment with questions or suggestions. 

Keep checking in for more updates. Our next goal is to add lesson plans for a Linguistic Anthropology lesson about language, an excavation lesson in Archaeology, and a museum lesson in cultural anthropology. 

One of our most important biological anthropology lessons, evolution, is now up and running. This week, we taught students at Arcadia about natural selection, mutation, gene flow, and genetic drift. 

We challenged the students to create adaptations for existing animals in a new environment. You can access the lesson and activity page by clicking here.

A few weeks ago, students at Tuscaloosa Magnet School Elementary learned about different forms of body adornment in our Seeing Culture lesson. 

Our Body Modifications lesson is a great way to review what ethnocentrism is and how we can avoid it, because body modifications vary widely between cultures. 

For the activity, the students were able to mark themselves with temporary tattoos. 

To download our lesson plan and presentation, read through our Seeing Culture activity page, or access the lesson plan directly without download.anthropologyiselemental.ua.edu/seeing-culture.html#lessons


To read more about TMSE's experience, read our blog post: "Body Modification at TMSE by Labethany Bradford"

We are working to make our materials as widely available as possible. Previously, all our lesson plans were only available by download through Microsoft Word. 
We've now added text versions of all the lesson plans for those on tablets or without the ability to download.

They can be accessed here:
Creating Culture
Documenting Culture
Documenting the Past

Soon, we will add textual versions of our activities to each of these, so keep watching our site for updates!

Last week at Tuscaloosa Magnet School Elementary, the students learned about primate behavior in our Playful Primates lesson. 

They learn about primate diet (and get to sample some delicious primate cuisine: bugs!) and locomotion. The students must collect food items during the Meddling Monkeys Scavenger hunt while knuckle walking like a gorilla. 

​To access all the activity materials, read our Playful Primates​ activity page. 

As you may have noticed, we are starting to add video content to our website. It is our mission to make these materials more accessible to our audience. This includes adding captions to our videos. 

This is a learning process for all of us as we navigate the world of videography, so thank you in advance for being patient as we upload more content. 

Our ultimate goal is to caption all of our videos, including captioned translations into different languages. 

We're excited about expanding our website. Thank you for visiting our site and be sure to check back, as we make weekly updates. 

In the meantime, check out our newest lesson, Playful Primates and learn about a popular activity with the students: eating bugs.

 Take a closer look inside the Arcadia Bosses-one of the clans from Arcadia Elementary School. They are explaining their cultural values to the other clan. 

​This video corresponds to the Documenting Culture: What is Ethnography?  and the Creating Culture: Making a Clan activities. By filming the students as they present their culture, we are creating an ethnography by documenting their culture in action.