Hello,
Friends!
One of
the things I love to do is to help students and the general public develop a
deeper understanding and love for history. While I get to do this regularly
with field trips and giving tours of the Memorial, I only have around one hour
to cover the history of D-Day in the context of World War II. While I have been
able to inspire most with the personal stories of D-Day veterans and their
families, most of our youth like to learn with their hands and through
interactions which is difficult to do with large groups in such a short period
of time.
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| One of our History Explorers watching rain form from the cloud. |
This is
why I love our partnership with a local elementary school in the county through
the 21st Century Grant
program. Through this partnership, students travel up to the Memorial once a
week for eight weeks for an hour each visit. In this time, we get to explore
and interact with the history of D-Day. This is what we have done for the past
few weeks:
On the
third week of the program, we talked about preparing and planning for the D-Day
invasion. We talked about, and even tested each other on, requirements to be a
part of the military, analyzed the invasion map and created our own, and
finally discussed how weather impacted the invasion and did an experiment on
how rain forms with shaving cream and food coloring.
On the
fifth week, we talked about the naval and air operations of the D-Day invasion.
We created our own Higgins boats (LCVPs) and tested them to see how much weight
they could hold. We also made our own P-51 Mustang paper airplanes.
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| Our History Explorers shopping for a meal with only 10 ration points and $5. |
Last
week, we interacted with artifacts from the homefront and tried our hand at
shopping with ration points in the Memorial’s “Piggly Wiggly.” And today, we
will be talking about the importance of victory in WWII and how we can honor
veterans today. We will be making V-Pins and creating this fun craft as a card to hand out
to veterans at the Memorial’s Veterans Day ceremony on November 11th.
Not
only can history be relevant to us today, but we have to remember that it can
be fun, as well. That is why I love working with our History Explorers. Instead
of learning history through a lecture or PowerPoint in a classroom, we can get
our hands dirty and tangible interact with the past in a way that they will
remember for years to come.
Until
next time,
-Maggie
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