This Thursday evening the sixth-grade class will showcase their year-long hard work for an exhibition evening at the Rogers Historical Museum. This will be the second year the exhibition evening will take place. 
Mr. Aaron Jones, Director of Arts Integration and Museum Partnerships, and Mr. Joel Taylor, sixth grade Social Studies teacher have been collaborating for five years on arts integration units that span the entire year for Social Studies. The mission was to create curriculum that offered an arts integration project at the end of each unit. Each arts integration project would be an object created by the students that reflected the era and culture studied. These works served as “artifacts”; evidence of their historic study as well as learned artistic techniques and skills. After a few years of adjustments, the curriculum and the projects proved to be a success!
To capitalize on this achievement, Mr. Jones contacted the Rogers Historical Museum and talked with Museum Director, Serena Barnett, and Ashley Sayers, Education Manager, about an opportunity for the students to display their “artifacts” at the museum for an exhibition evening. Serendipitously, Ms. Sayers was in the development of a Museum Education program that introduced students to museum occupations. AAA sixth grade served as a pilot for this program.
Ms. Sayers planned a comprehensive museum educational experience for our students. During the fall semester the sixth grade visited the Rogers Historical Museum to learn the responsibilities and duties of specific museum occupations that develop, manage, and install exhibitions. Museum staff toured students through the galleries, education spaces and the vaults for the collections to explain the importance of themes for the exhibition, object placements, and content for labels. At the end of the day students participated in an activity in which small groups selected five objects from the museum’s teaching collection, develop a theme for an exhibition, wrote labels for each object, displayed the objects and labels, and then presented the connection of each object in the exhibition to the rest of the class. The exercise was designed to assist students as they plan for their upcoming exhibition with the museum.
Now, after two semesters of social studies and the creation of artifacts ranging from prehistorical cultures to imperial dynasties of China; the sixth-grade students are ready to share their exhibition with the public. Students have developed labels, written tours and have installed their exhibition at the museum. Artifacts Across the Ages is the name of the exhibition and an opening for family and friends will be held this Thursday, May 23rd from 5-7 pm at Rogers Historical Museum.
The sixth-grade class 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 and Executive Director, Serena Barnett!