Homeschooling With the Brady Bunch

Today at lunch, Boo was wondering what archaeologists would find out about the Brady Bunch after digging up their trash. An interesting question, don’t you think? We recently finished reading Archaeologists Dig For Clues as part of our history lessons. The book makes the point that archaeologists rarely dig for treasure, but can learn so much about people from the trash they leave behind. We had a discussion about what our family’s trash would tell archaeologists of the future about us. Not so much our garbage trash, which would be unlikely to be found around our home, but rather the things we might accidentally leave behind, like maybe a plastic sword from our Playmobile pirate ship.

I guess this book has made a bigger impression on my children that I had thought. We’ve been watching a lot of old Brady Bunch episodes on DVD lately, which my children are really getting into. Looks like they’ve made quite an impression, too. In one episode, Tiger chews up one of Greg’s shoes, which he obviously needs to throw away now. So while I prepared my own lunch, we determined that archaeologists, in finding Greg’s chewed up shoe, could determine the following things:

From the size, style and color of the shoe, the family had a teenage son.
The family had a dog
From the materials the shoe was made from, how it was made, and the style, the family lived in the late 20th Century

Which only goes to show you that learning is not confined to textbooks. I wonder if anyone has ever made a unit study from the Brady Bunch?