Saturday, December 01, 2007
Study Trip to Roman Mosaic Site
The high school students from Ms. Pienta's and Ms. Novak's AVID classes combined with their teachers and tutors on a study trip to the ancient Roman villa at Piazza Armerina.
Once at the site, students were divided into five groups and assigned to a specific room within the site to study and learn about the floor mosaic. Next, each group chose a "docent," or "expert" to explain their room to the other groups. Students then rotated from room to room, listening to the explanations and asking questions. All the docents did a GREAT job!
The Roman villa is thought to have been the hunting lodge of an emperor of the Roman Empire in the 3rd or 4th century A.D. The villa floors cover 3500 square meters (42 colorful floors in 63 rooms) and are made up of an estimated 30 million little tiles. We had the opportunity on this trip to see the villa undergoing an Xtreme makeover! A grant from either UNESCO or perhaps Italy is paying for the cleaning, restoring, and preservation of this fabulously rich archaeological site. We could still move around and see most of the floors, but we also saw lots of workers, hoses, bags of grout, tiles, glue, air hoses, electrical cords, plastic, etc. It was archaeology at work!
Another high school AVID study trip is planned for late May or early June to attend an evening performance of an original ancient Greek play in the Greek theater at Siracusa.
Labels: AVID, inquiry, mosaics, Roman villa
