Curious Cavern : Students Dig the Experience of Earthmobile, a Museum on Wheels That Will Visit 100 Schools

Sophy Po waited with impatience as she sat primly on a canvas stool, an archeologist’s vest hanging artlessly off her shoulders.

“Found anything yet?” the fifth-grader demanded of a classmate, who scooped up a handful of sand and sifted meticulously for artifacts. When the classmate shook her head in reply, Sophy urged: “Deeper, deeper!”

Around her, sumac and lupine sprouted high. A menagerie of wild animals peered down curiously from the branches of a shady oak and from atop a rocky overhang. And a dozen other young Indiana Joneses also searched excitedly for curios--an arrowhead here, a raccoon bone there.

So went excavations Wednesday morning in the Arroyo de las Ventanas, a “coastal canyon” unlike any other because it sits in an 18-foot long trailer.

The hands-on nature exhibit was dubbed the Earthmobile by its creators, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. With a collage of brightly colored animal paintings on its sides, the mobile made a splashy debut Wednesday at Hazeltine Avenue School in Van Nuys, where it will be parked for the next two weeks before being towed to other Los Angeles elementary schools.

A virtual museum on wheels, the Earthmobile offers third- through sixth-graders an opportunity to explore a Southern California habitat, study local American Indian culture and gain an understanding of the natural sciences. In a time when schools can rarely afford field trips, the traveling exhibit brings the great outdoors right onto the playground, with replica plants and stuffed animals from museum taxidermists.

“It’s one of the most fantastic things we could have,” said school board member Roberta Weintraub, who helped secure a $1.2-million private grant for the project from the Maxwell H. Gluck Foundation. “With the dearth of extra activities for kids, to be able to have something like this is so exciting.”

School district and museum officials said the grant will cover expenses for three years, during which the exhibit will be trucked to about 100 schools.

“It’s a dream come true,” said Sara A. Coughlin, superintendent for campuses in the East Valley elementary school district. “This is my vision of what every classroom in the 21st Century should look like. This represents an integrated, hands-on experience.”

Groups of 15 students at a time troop into the educational big rig and are formed into teams of three. A museum instructor teaches the youngsters archeological methods, outfits them in vests, furnishes them with field notebooks and sets them to work excavating separate troughs filled with sand, each hiding replicas of artifacts found in Chumash Indian encampments.

Sarah Jones, 10, hit paydirt when she found a game piece, similar to a die, fashioned from half a nutshell.

“It’s a walnut, full of tar and a couple of seashells,” she said, pointing at four opalescent slivers winking under a magnifying lamp.

Museum instructor Megan Walsh confirmed Sarah’s pronouncement. “They would use it for games--like when we play Yahtzee,” Walsh told the youngsters after they reassembled to share their finds. No one, however, was familiar with Yahtzee, a dice game.

Teacher Josette Baumsten said her class prepared for the Earthmobile experience by discussing Chumash customs, drawing pictographs as the Chumash did and even learning the basics of the metric system for archeological purposes.

“Our teacher brought us things from home, and we had to measure them,” explained 11-year-old Sophy, who spoke glowingly of her Earthmobile stint.

“Normally, we always go in the classroom and do work, and do reading. Here it’s fun. We can do research and be archeologists,” said Sophy, adding that she now wants to become an archeologist when she grows up.

At the end of each dig-and-discuss session in the Earthmobile, a hologram of an archeologist--supposedly from the year 2305--appears on a screen and addresses the students. The woman, who describes Arroyo de las Ventanas as a wilderness finally laid waste by humans, entreats her listeners to conserve resources and think environmentally to prevent natural areas from becoming landfills.

“We want each kid to walk away with a sense of stewardship,” instructor Kim Milliken said. “They know each of them personally is responsible for the environment.”