We missed you today. I love the bustle of culminating events; the urgency of the students as they set up and teach their "customers" about what they've learned. One of the things I most love is the students' opportunity to "wow" their parents with their professionalism and how they're able to communicate what they know. They are so proud when they get to teach you. I hope they'll still have that opportunity at home, perhaps as you peruse the souvenir program they'll bring home tomorrow or perhaps as you look through the photos below. But one of the things I cannot recreate is the power of someone else's parent taking the time to learn from you. I am always so touched with the time that parents take with everyone's children, not just their own. It is a precious gift. I cannot wait until we can welcome you back into school.
Today the Herons and Robins did a great job turning the whole school into the 1860 Prairie Creek World's Fair. The Political Pavilion literally popped with action as students used party popper cannons in a reenactment of the burning of the White House in 1812. Students taught about the Louisiana Purchase, child labor and the North Star, Frederick Douglass's newspaper. You could walk a scale model of the Cherokee trail of tears and learn about the Supreme Court's rulings on The Indian Removal Act. You could make protest signs about abolition and women's rights.
At the science pavilion, you could meet Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America. You could also learn about the smallpox vaccine and the discovery of the cause of cholera - both medical breakthroughs of the age that saved millions of lives. You could dig for dinosaur fossils with Waterhouse Hawkins and then, in a dark corner, you could learn the grisly details of the hole in Alexis St. Martin's stomach that led to our first understanding of how digestion worked.
Then you could head upstairs (by way of the elevator demonstration!) to the Invention Pavilion to learn about graham crackers, canned food, potato chips and donuts. The sewing machine and mechanical looms were also on display. A clipper ship demonstration competed for your attention with a steam boat booth. Finally, you could send a message across the room using our working telegraph.
Here is the overview of the theme that Amber and I wrote for the occasion:
Industrial Revolution Theme Overview
The Industrial Revolution was the perfect match for the Herons’ and Robins’ interest in history, role play, inventions and business. We have spent the last two months studying the complex interplay among commerce, expansionism, immigration, technology, innovation and labor. It’s weighty stuff, to be sure, but our role play made these huge topics personal and meaningful. Each labor saving invention was celebrated or, if it meant losing one’s job, feared. Each political happening was debated from multiple sides.
We studied the scientific understanding of the time – taking a close look at steam engines and mills. Students were shocked at the pace of change during the nineteenth century. In their lifetimes, the agrarian world that had been human existence for millennia, changed completely. In 1804 we tried our hand at weaving and spinning. Meeting our basic needs would have taken all day. By 1859, when our role play ended, threshers and reapers did the work of 20 men, mills operated 14 hours a day to produce cloth, messages could travel over wires, and rails and canals transported goods hundreds of miles – farther than most people traveled in their lives just a generation before.
We learned about the medical understanding of the time – from the first ever vaccine that eventually eradicated small pox to a map that helped us understand the source of cholera. The industrial revolution was the beginning of modern medicine when we first began to understand how our bodies functioned and what caused them to become ill.
Role play helped us think about whose stories often got told and whose didn’t. Women’s viewpoints were often missing – even as their role in society began to shift dramatically. Black people had to start their own newspapers, like the North Star, in order to share their stories. Because of laws against educating enslaved people, many stories were never recorded at all. Likewise, indigenous people rarely had a voice in the debates of the time. News coverage in white newspapers was biased and one sided and few people at the time thought to challenge those representations.
Through our discussions and debates, we were able to see that every event had many different impacts. Every issue had many different sides. History is never a simple narrative – it is many truths intertwined.
And here are some pictures:
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