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Colonial Day is a culminating activity where students and faculty dress in costume, act in character, and welcome members of the GA community to experience their staging of a Colonial Market. The students spend two months researching, visiting various museums, discussing, observing, writing and building in order to produce Colonial Day.
In the past, our "living" classroom museum would be gone in a day. The Internet allows us to recreate the experience and share our knowledge by constructing an online museum.
The Class of 2011 welcomes
your to the
Colonial Market Museum
Please click on the each display below to learn more about Colonial Trades:
Process:
The children began preparing for the Marketplace by studying their trade classroom books and information on the Internet about colonial times.
Each child selected a trade, researching it in detail.
Each student was responsible for bringing in at least four items that related to their trade. These included tools and materials used to create their products, as well as samples of the finished products. They labeled each item for display, just like in the museum exhibits they had visited earlier. However, unlike the museums that have actual artifacts from colonial times, our students selected objects that most closely represented their concepts.
Each trade had it's own booth. Students painted signs for their "shops." In Colonial days, most trades people hung up pictures painted on wooden boards to identify their business, because many of the town's people could not read. Students also painted backdrops to further simulate their shop environment.
Students developed scripts to be memorized and recited on Colonial Day to guests as they visited the trades people's stalls. Over the course of the Fall semester our students experienced many aspects of Colonial life while visiting Pennsbury Manor, RIdley Plantation and Rittenhousetown. They had learned the most from the "living museums" whose docents recreated the colonial experience. Like the guides at these museum, the students at Colonial Day assumed roles and answered detailed questions from visitors about their business and wares. They had to be well prepared in order to answer questions, becoming experts in their field. It was a wonderful learning experience to share all the information they had learned.
We are pleased to share that information with additional visitors in our Online Marketplace Museum. Please click on the trades above to see the displays designed by our students.
