Recently, the fifth and sixth graders set out for a field experience at the Peabody Museum in New Haven. When we got to the museum, we split up and the fifth grade went straight to the Mesoamerican exhibit on the second floor. We immediately saw a colossal Olmec head! This is one of the civilizations we talked about in class and we had only seen pictures of their sculptures. After that, we attempted to complete a scavenger hunt of Mesoamerican artifacts that our teacher Mrs. Raggio had provided. We saw things like cups, bowls, and one thing that really surprised us was a vase with a scene on it. The scene was a group of people playing with a rubber ball. That surprised us because we didn’t know that they knew about rubber back then.

As we started to leave, we met up with the sixth graders who were exploring the dinosaur section, so we joined in! We saw skeletons of wooly mammoths and other dinosaurs. One of the skeletons we saw was Lucy, the early hominid. We will learn more about that next year! On the way back to school, we stopped at Modern Apizza to eat some world famous New Haven pizza. It was so good! The trip was both educational and fun!

Written by fifth grade students – Owen Howe and Arthur Pompa