What kid doesn’t love sifting through the sand for buried treasure?
Cheryl Francis, gifted teacher in the Bowling Green School District, has come up with a month-long
project for her elementary students, capitalizing on the fascination of dirt and the love of a good
mystery.
Her archaeology "dig" is set up in the parking lot of the former Central Administration
building off Buttonwood Avenue. It involves students in PACE: Providing Acceleration, Creativity and
Enrichment.
The 40 students in grades three through six sift through the soil to find jewelry, arrowheads, a rusty
lantern, animal skulls, a belt buckle, bricks, chunks of pottery and the occasional earthworm. There are
three layers and each tells a story.
Francis said the students use a variety of skills while digging. They draw their artifact, measure it and
record the details. They’re asked to write what they think it was used for, and what it tells about the
people.
"The best part for me is when the child looks at the artifact and tries to create a scenario,"
she said.
Francis said the exercise is teaching "a lot of things – problem solving and learning a process and
knowing sometimes you have to do something in a certain order."
Every grid and layer has something in it, but some areas have more than others. Francis said patience is
another lesson.
Before the five third-graders headed out to dig on a sunny Wednesday morning last week, they go over the
rules.
"We don’t dig," Francis prompted.
"We scrape," said Nathan Hershberger, a Kenwood student.

There’s also don’t dig in someone else’s space and be quiet in the hall going down the stairs.
Next, the students lug down big red boxes filled with tools from the third-floor classroom to the parking
lot. Each box contains a trowel, graph paper, measuring tape, pencil, Sharpie, gloves, baggies,
clipboard and field record sheet.
Francis carefully removes the blue tarp covering the site and the student settle next to a neatly
measured area, about 1 ½ feet by 1 ½ feet, to begin the search.
After scraping for a minute, Kloe Atwood from Conneaut, holds up broken pieces of pottery. "I think
a flower pot broke. I found some pieces of it," she theorized.
Gus Eschedor, from Crim, turns an animal skull around in his hands, coming to the conclusion that it had
been a wild boar. "Maybe they chopped them up and then they ate them," he said.
The recovered artifacts are then carted back upstairs to a separate classroom. Francis has laid out brown
paper and made it into a grid similar to the dig area downstairs. The treasures are laid out in the
corresponding areas where they were found.
There’s a story in each layer – about the people and what they did with the things that have been
uncovered. The children, with Francis’s guidance, will work through it and then write reports.
Francis said the dig was made possible through the help of PACE parents, her husband, Rob, who created
the template, and Jim Palmer Excavating, which donated the sand. The parents and Francis also
contributed the artifacts – some are real, some not – and helped bury them.
There have also been some surprises found in the dig, including a plastic green Army man missing his head
and pen caps, perhaps left over from the old junior high, Francis said.
The dig fits nicely into the PACE theme for this school year, "It’s About Time."
In past years, her projects have included a space theme, culminating in a visit to the Challenger
Learning Center in Oregon, and turning the whole floor of her building into Ellis Island for an
immigration lesson.
Francis has been teaching in the PACE program since 1991. The gifted students leave their elementary once
a week to meet the whole day with her.
"The major goal is to meet the academic needs, to give them some extra challenge," she said.