The History Kids

EVENT--History Kids as tour guides

based on

Historic Linden Place’s Wax Museum

Activity Overview:         

The Wax Museum is a good event for school/museum partnerships.  Students re-enact people of the past who are associated with the saga of Linden Place and Bristol History. It is especially effective to have a student stand under the portrait of the character if the portrait is available.  Students stand like statues and visitors press a sticker on a student’s hand to make that character “come to life” and tell his/her story.

Grades: 

Any.  The script to be memorized is simple for youngsters and is more complicated for older students.

Curriculum Alignment:            

RHODE ISLAND GRADE SPAN EXPECTATIONS/RI HISTORY   History is an account of human activities that is interpretive in nature.

Students interpret history as a series of connected events with multiple cause-effect relationships, by

1. describing and organizing a sequence of significant events in Rhode Island history.

1. explaining and inferring how a sequence of events affected people of Rhode Island .

Estimated time:   (This is using the school, or using the museum, to have History Kids after school meetings.)  If the scripts are written then there only need to be 4 or 5 1-hour meetings with the students. 

Objectives:  Students will learn about the privateers and slave trade captains and their wives, and about the industrial capitalists-- and women in their families--who lived at Linden Place and who had great impact on the welfare of the town of Bristol.  Students will be using and interacting with primary source artifacts and documents.  They will be working with historians.

Materials:  costumes, scripts, good quality stickers or hand stamps

One adult to every 8-10 History Kids.  Teachers need an historic site.

Museums need a teacher or a PTA/PTO.

Teacher Talking Points: A country’s enemies often considered privateers pirates.  However, Simeon Potter went beyond his “letter of marque” attacked and plundered a defenseless town. 

By 1808 James DeWolf had quit the slave trade and invested his slavery profits in the new cotton mills that needed southern slave-harvested cotton. 

George DeWolf kept up his slave trading pursuits even after it was outlawed.

The devastating economic ruin of Bristol from George DeWolf’s bankruptcy was believed by many townspeople to be a “comeuppance” and that the town would not recover until all of the “slave money” was gone.

The whole town, and state, profited from the slave trade.

DeWolfs owned distilleries and sugar plantations and insurance companies—all aspects of the Triangle Trade.

Samuel Pomeroy Colt  owned the rubber factory that became Uniroyal Tire and he owned the bank that became Fleet Bank (later acquired by Bank America.)

Russell Warren designed many beautiful homes and the country’s first indoor shopping mall.

Linden Place has an entryway design that requires two floors to complete.  It has the only 4-story, freestanding, spiral, wooden staircase in a residence in America.

Calendar:

meeting one month before

1. Bring the students through the museum that they will be showing.  Tell them the story that they will be telling.

1. Prepare the scripts.  Add additional historic figures for educational embellishments if you need to.

1. Assign scripts, shifts and costumes.  Tell the students that next week they will be reading/reciting their lines to listeners.

1. If you will be serving refreshments warn your committee to have lemonade or cider rather than a punch that stains costumes.  Plan where you will serve --away from students who can denude a buffet table in under 3 minutes!

meeting three weeks before

1. Have some students in costume for photos for the media and to advertise the event.

1. Create a flier for the event.  Get permission from the school to distribute the flier to classrooms and order from the printer or begin printing enough.

1. Teach the children how to stand as a statue.  Have them look down at the floor, which is easier on the eyes. 

1. Break the group into 3 or 4 smaller groups and have the students take turns saying their lines for the members of their group.

1. Bring them back to the big group and ask for volunteers to “read” their lines first.  Often, at this point, somebody has memorized his/her lines and this will give others impetus to memorize.  Ask others to read until everyone has read.

meeting two weeks before

1. Discuss how students need to encourage and help each other.  Discuss how students want visitors to respond to well so students need to be nice to each other. 

1. Split the group in two. 

1. Assign Group 1 to stand as statues in various parts of the room.

1. Have group 2 walk about pressing the stickers on group 1’s hands to listen to those students perform.

1. Switch and have Group 2 be statues and Group 1 will be the visitors.

meeting one week before

1. If possible, make this meeting at the museum.

1. This may also be the “dress rehearsal.”

1. Establish rules such as “nobody leaves this area without telling me.”  And “no girls in gowns on the stairs unless you are with your parents.” and “Behave with decorum—many people are taking pictures of you!” or “Do not touch the…..”

1. Teach them buffet table manners if you will be serving refreshments.  Let them know when they will be allowed to visit the refreshment table.  (We find that when their parents come at shift’s end is the best time to do refreshments and stairways, etc.)

1. Have students stand where they will stand on Event Day. 

1. If there is more than one shift, have shift one be statues and shift two will be the visitors.  Then switch.  Or, you and other adults go about and press stickers for the students to perform.

1. This is the best time to capture video because there isn’t visitor background noise.

Performance Day

1. Have the scripts cut and past each roll onto an index card for the students who didn’t memorize to do “readers’ theater.”  Or for those with stage fright who need to read.

1. Be sure you have a first aid kit—we always get a boo-boo!

1. Be sure you have a list of parent cell phones and that all of the adult facilitators have a copy.

Follow up

            Send a thank you letter to the students that they can use in their portfolios.  Give them a junior membership—since they need to be accompanied by an adult, the museum gets a paying guest or two whenever that child visits!