Creative History
I have been distressed lately about hearing of the noticeable decline in our children’s knowledge of history. So I have been asking those with whom I have talked about their children and grandchildren’s studies of this country’s beginnings in their schools.
I got back one wonderful reply from my sister-in-law about the program that is being practiced in our hometown in Connecticut. It brings tears to my eyes to hear how all the second grade teachers in town are working with their students to help bring history alive. This year they hired enough busses to carry all of these children to the main historical sites and landmarks of the town for a day. Since our town is almost like a microcosm of our country’s history it is an ideal place to explore and to learn.
They start with the glacial period where layers of rock, sand, and minerals were deposited and how the river carved its way through. They visited one of the most spectacular sites in town, that of the huge brownstone quarries that were opened and worked very early in human history. First, by the Wangunk Indians and then by various waves of immigrants who were drawn here to the quarries. There is a park now near these quarries and they stopped by there. Then they went on to explore more Indian sites near the river. They saw the railroad bridge which has been used in a movie, and the Arrigoni Bridge that crosses the river. They visited the earliest architecture of the town, the houses, the churches, the row houses used by the earliest immigrants, the cemeteries containing the old gravestones of the earliest settlers. They saw monuments prominently displayed in the village of Gildersleeve of a Civil War soldier. In this village there was much more to be seen such as the site by the river where there was a very successful shipbuilding industry, the flat areas where the tobacco was raised now is used to start trees for orchards, due to the decline in interest in smoking cigars. There are still some sheds where the tobacco leaves were hung up to dry. There are at least three one room school houses left in the different areas of town and the site of an old grist mill and much, much more.
Then the next day when they were back in school each child drew a picture of his or her favorite place or historic site that they had visited and they were displayed in the post office! What a wonderful reinforcement to such a creative method to present a history lesson to be remembered for a lifetime! I love it!
I am in tears here thinking about this project as we learned about the history of the town mostly through our families and their stories, that is if one’s family was history-minded. I can’t remember much was said in school about all this.
Must be that the second grade is thought to be a good age to begin history study as my grandsons, David and Charlie had a teacher in second grade who loved to teach about his three main interests, that of stamp collecting, beekeeping, and the ethnic background of his students. The local post office had displays up all year showing each student’s own illustrated stamp. It certainly raised Charlie’s awareness of the world around him and I can observe traces of this teacher’s efforts in their lives to this day.
