Camp Week One: Early Humans

This week we had a lot of fun with early human history. The casa kids were treated to a replica dig site, complete with dinosaur skeletons to be assembled and research station. We also set up a makeshift cave upon which to do try our hand at cave drawings. Small children really dig (pun intended) hanging out in caves! They also sprayed stencils and pressed ammonites and dinosaur claws into fimo pendants.

In elementary, we went way back past the beginning of human history – back 417 million years into the Devonian period to look at ammonites, brachiopods and trilobite fossils. We followed the true story of Mary Anning who searched along the coasts of Lyme Regis in England and began to turn up evidence that would fundamentally change philosophical and scientific though. Due to rain, we were unable to go fossil hunting at Etienne Brule park but instead checked out the ROM’s fossil collection and of course made a detour to visit those relative newcomers of the Jurassic age. It was, however, the humble opossum in the Hall of Mammals who raised  a real stir. Since the children are diurnal, they are not generally up late enough to see these large rodents lurking under downtown porches though I suspect a few of them may be found waiting up late to see one tonight.

Midweek, we made a jump forward along the evolutionary timeline to learn about cro magnon and neanderthal humans and plotted their days against a fundamental needs chart that helped us understand a bit more about what a stone age day was like. We also discovered that it is difficult to a clear story in pictograms.