Yesterday, when I asked the Elms to share the oldest thing they'd ever touched, many wrote something like, "My Great Grandmother." Today they're able to answer a little more dramatically. Jon Buck came to our classroom and shared tiles, a lamp, a jar, a bronze statue, a toga tie, keys, rings and coins that he uncovered during his years as a world traveler. He uses a state of the art metal detector (and some old fashioned history research) to unearth these treasures for universities, museums and governments.
I was surprised by my own reaction to holding such ancient items. It was a thrilling connection to what
we've been learning. It was so easy to imagine the family who used the same lamp two thousand years ago or traded with the same coin. These are the kind of thing most of us only get to see behind glass in a museum, isolated and precious. While they are certainly still precious, they seem so much more
real now.
Mr. Buck gave us each a coin from the second century CE. We broke out our magnifying glasses and played numismatic detective -- "is that a pig or a she-wolf?" What a treasure (literally and figureatively.)
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