Students 'Living History'

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Veterans Elementary School students (from front) Phillip Hernandez and Tristen Wood and their classmates enjoyed getting their hands wet, panning for gold.

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Shirley Lane Elementary student Julius Mosley, with the help of the Kern County Museum’s Kristen Watt, discovered what a chore hand washing and hanging clothes to dry was.

Many of today’s pre-teen students never grew up hanging clothes with wooden pins, churning butter or panning for gold. The Kern County Museum takes them back in time, eight times a year with one day interactive "California History Day" and "Living History Day" events, to see how and why it was done. The latest such activity, Feb. 28th’s Living History Day, attracted approximately 800 grades 3-6 students, parents and teachers from Kern County and even as far away as Visalia.

"We are in our fourth year of providing this hands-on history experience you cannot get in the classroom," said Jackie Brouillette, the museum’s education and volunteer services manager. "Students get to do things they will remember, such as churning butter and panning for gold. We want to inspire and have them remember what they learned here, so it helps when discussions of early American life come up in the classroom weeks down the road."

Docents in historic garb of the day are everywhere. It is a collaborative effort with Valley Oaks Charter School teachers and students and volunteer students from Bakersfield High’s CEO Academy working side-by-side with museum staff and volunteers to lead tours, provide information and demonstrate frontier life. One excited third-grader from Veterans Elementary School in Bakersfield, Anna Weldon, was astonished to see how rope was made by hand.

"We got to work and play like how it was back then," Weldon said. "It was fun, but it would have been terrible to live back then," Weldon said. "They had to come up with ways to work around things we take for granted today."

There was plenty of evidence of that. In addition to the rope making, butter churning, hand clothes washing and gold panning, students saw how biscuits were cooked in Dutch ovens over an outside campfire. Among other memorable activities, they took tours of Bakersfield’s early 20th Century Howell House, saw Native American Indians at work weaving with yarn and reeds, tried their hands sending Morse Code on a telegraph, petted the horse of a real live cowboy and learned about branding cattle from his sidekick.

"Does it hurt the cattle," Valley Oaks Charter School teacher Tom Shelton was asked, as he demonstrated how the branding iron works on a piece of wood. "A little. But a cow’s hide is really thick. We get the iron really hot and then quickly touch it against the hide. It acts like a shot to numb your tooth. We wait a bit and then put the iron on the same spot where we hold it only long enough to burn the brand into the hide."

The museum offers the educational tours to school districts for $7 a student and in the brochure points out that the day meets California State Curriculum Standards, even providing a standards correlation chart to help teachers plan curriculum for their classes. If you are interested in getting your students involved in an upcoming California History Day or Living History Day, contact Brouillette at (661) 852-5054. The next one is coming up from 9 a.m.-noon on March 13.

"We study an entire component on pioneer life in class before the students get to the museum to see it re-enacted in real life," said Veterans Elementary teacher Tara Micheletto. "It helps students remember things like when the Gold Rush was. The curriculum will continue back at school where they will be journaling what they learned today, which will help bring the entire education experience together for them."


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