Artifact Bag in the Classroom

For my group's inquiry bag, we decided to utilize an activity that was introduced to us by our professor. We decided to use artifact bags within the classroom as a way to make our lesson fun, engaging, and interesting to the students.
Since our topic was "People Moving, People Changing", our group was tasked with teaching the students all about immigration, culture, and what it means to be an American citizen. We thought that a good way to integrate artifact bags was to call them "luggage bags". These bags belonged to immigrants that are moving to America. The students' task was to discover which country the luggage bag was from and which immigrant pen pal it was.
We explained the situation to the students using a video where a flight attendant asked the students for her help finding and giving back the missing luggage bags. Students had to act as detectives and use their observation senses (the four senses) to discover the objects that were in the bag.
The activity was incredibly successful, which was clearly seen through the student's excitement over discovering what objects were in the bag. We were able to find some really interesting objects too, such as an Irish wool hat and Russian nesting dolls. Each student was able to experience the different cultures of the countries around the world through these objects. The best part of the lesson was the closure when students were asked to bring one item up to the front of the classroom to share with the class. You could visibly see the pride and excitement the students had over learning about this cultural object.