Students in Mr. Taylor’s Social Studies classes are preparing to have an Exhibition Night at Rogers Historical Museum!
Mr. Jones, Director of Arts Integration, and Mr. Taylor have collaborated to create a curriculum for 6th grade Social Studies that incorporate an arts integration project at the end of each unit. The results have been amazingly successful. Not only do the projects make connections to the core content of the discipline, they mimic the artifacts of the culture being studied; creations such as Babylonian cuneiform cones, Egyptian hieroglyphic slabs, Chinese woodblocks and Japanese Haiku Haigas. Students are engaged with assignments and recall the content of the class easily as the object incorporates culture, economics, religious significance and/ or agricultural connections.
After four years of piloting various projects Mr. Jones and Mr. Taylor wanted to develop an opportunity for the students to display their “artifacts”. Over the summer, Mr. Jones contacted the Rogers Historical Museum to see if it were possible for the 6th grade to work with museum staff to plan and curate an exhibition at the museum that would showcase their “artifacts”. Ashely Sayers, Education Manager at Rogers Historical Museum, was eager to collaborate and planned a comprehensive museum educational experience for our students!
This week the 6th grade visits the museum to learn the responsibilities and duties of specific museum occupations that develop, manage and set up exhibitions. The museum staff toured students through the galleries and highlighted the importance of themes for the exhibition, object placements, and content for labels. Additionally the student toured the vaults of the museum and learned about Collection Management.
Their day concludes with an activity in which students were instructed to select five objects from the museum’s teaching collection, develop a theme for an exhibition, write labels for each object, display the objects and labels, then present the connection of each objects in the exhibition to the rest of the class. The results were impressive mini exhibitions of several different themes. The exercise was designed by Ashley Sayers to assist students as they plan for their upcoming exhibition with the museum.
The 6th grade class will install their exhibition, Artifacts Across the Ages, the week of May 22nd and hold an opening for family and friends on Thursday, May 25th from 5-7 pm at Rogers Historical Museum.
The 6th grade classes would like to extend a huge THANK YOU to our partnering museum the Rogers Historical Museum for this opportunity! Special thank you to Ashely Sayers, Education Manager; Glen Christophersen, Education Assistant; Jennifer Kick, Collections Manager; Rachel Smith, Curator of Collections and Executive Director, Serena Barnett!