Dive Right In!

Wow! It’s my third day on the job at FPAN Northeast, and I’ve gotten to jump in with both feet. Sarah, Toni, Rosalie, and I have been playing with kids at a variety of camps, including one for middle-school students from around Florida and two for elementary-aged kids in St. Augustine and Hastings.

It’s our second week of camp, and we dove right into underwater Archaeology, exploring some of the basics of digging in the deep. The kids got to learn about how a shipwreck turns into an archaeological site over time, as well as learning some hand signals used for communicating underwater. They also got to put their hands (and sometimes feet) on Sarah’s very own SCUBA equipment!

Finally, as a means of learning how archaeologists use grids in underwater sites, the kids got to play Battleship. They set up the ships on their own sites, then called out coordinates to try and pin down the layout of their opponents’ ships, tracking the results on the Battleship grid.

We’ll continue the underwater exploration for a couple more weeks; next week we’ll map out our own shipwrecks using the Battleship grids, and in the final week the kids will build, sail, and sink their own ships!

Stay tuned for more adventures, landlubbers!

--Amber J.