One of my favorite PBS shows is Antiques Road Show. It's
interesting to see what people bring to the show to be appraised and the
fascinating historical stories behind the objects. I know what I would take to the
show. I have an heirloom Rio Grande wool blanket that my paternal
great-grandmother wove in New Mexico.
About ten years ago I had a small hole in
the blanket repaired. It cost me $300 but I did have an award winning New
Mexican weaver (her works are at the Smithsonian) repair the hole. My husband
painted this pastel of a weaving loom and put part of the design of our
family's blanket in the picture.
I don't know what the blanket is worth monetarily, but to me
it's priceless. Ever since I inherited the blanket, I have taken it to many
family weddings. Usually after the marriage ceremony, the newly married couple
kneels on the blanket and receives blessings from the guests, which are often
the sign of the cross on their foreheads, while someone sings the Entriega de los Novios. This is a ballad
for the newlyweds commemorating the day. The Spanish verses to the Entriega have been passed down for
generations in New Mexico Hispanic families.
In many historical fiction books there are often objects or
implied objects which play a part in the story. In the 2018 pending publication
of my middle grade historical fiction book, The
Wind Called My Name, one object I would associate with the story is a
pine cone from a piñon tree. The main character, Margaríta, believes
that the fragrance of the pine cone will help her remember her ancestral home,
New Mexico, and the nuts in the pine cone could be shared with a possible new
friend in Wyoming.
We recently attending our fourth grade grandson's
celebration of learning at an event called "Blast from the Past." To
partially meet the Colorado history standards, he wrote a research article and made a
timeline of a Colorado personality. Since he studied John Denver, the (pretend
artifact) he chose to display was a guitar.
Our grandson was dressed as John
Denver in a western shirt and wore round glasses as he manned his display area
with his information posted on his tri-board.
One student displayed traps as he portrayed a mountain man.
There were four classes of fourth graders so I wasn't able to see all the
displays, but I can imagine the learning that occurred as the students
created/gathered and wrote about their artifacts. Students put the parts they
learned together into a whole to create a new meaning or structure. A Common Core Language Arts standard states that students need to "refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text."
If I were in a Colorado fourth grade class today and needed
to bring an item for display in a Colorado History Museum, I might bring the
elbow length gloves Molly Brown put aside when she was helping people disembark
from the Titanic. (You can see that I'm making a logical inference about what Molly Brown might have worn after dining aboard the Titanic.)
When I was a teacher/librarian, the teachers and I
collaborated on various curriculum museums. In our storybook museum, one
student displayed shaved whiskers for the "hairs on my chinny, chin chin." In our Night of the Notables celebrations,
students met many requirements and one of them was to bring a food that would
reflect the person they studied. One student studied Harry Houdini and
creatively constructed a black top hat out of paper and filled it with pink
Peeps bunnies.
The possibilities are endless in creating curricular museums
and of course they could be extended to historical fiction. What historical
periods are your students studying that could extend to a museum culminating activity? What
are some real and implied objects in historical fiction books students could
uncover that could tell even more of the story?
What objects would your students display with these books? They
might need to stretch their minds and imply an object based on what they read in the text.
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