Week 7
So Week 7 was a short week, I headed down to Bedford on Tuesday, July 7th. We started another camp that day that was running from Tuesday-Thursday. It was a camp for Big Island Elementary School. I was only there the first day, but it was great to bond with the kids!
The camp was from 9-3:30 and we did activities back to back to back. I was assigned to a table, just like with the WWII Day Camp. I helped them with their activities, answered their questions, and of course gave them their snack 😉 We skipped the tour of the site that day of camp and spent a lot of time in the tent just learning lessons.
We went through a few areas of WWII, this camp was a combination of Spy Camp (which I missed the first time around) and WWII Day Camp. Each child got sworn into the Army by answering a few short & easy questions that were impossible to fail…although they definitely tried to fail each other! Haha! 🙂
Felicia then gave them a lesson on the women spies of WWII! It was an amazing lesson. I loved learning about it just as much as the kids did! A lot of these ladies risked it all, one even lost her leg and went back in through a DIFFERENT government spy agency because she wanted to help so badly. Many of them received awards after the war for their bravery during wartime. That lesson got the kids excited and intrigued about the “spy” aspects of camp.
We watched a few Disney cartoons that were put out during wartime as propaganda, which are really cute and worth a google search and a few minutes to watch. Donald Duck is hilarious, as always. Snowballing off of the video we watched we talked a lot about the propaganda used during the war and Maggie gave her lesson on the home front. It’s always fun to watch the kids guess what common everyday items are used for what.
Eventually, we were running WAY ahead of schedule, so we added in a lesson on D-Day to Victory from the website that I love oh so much (D-Day to Victory), and the kids were just enamored by the veterans’ stories. Of course, the weapons like the flamethrower helped the excitement level, too.
It was a fun day! The kids left happy and the adult that came with them was so happy to be there because she was learning a lot. By the end of the day, I had kiddos with their arms wrapped around me. It’s great to play a role in these kids lives in a way I haven’t before. Maybe one day one of them will get the urge to study history because of a little camp they attended in Bedford, Virginia.
Week 8
This week I made it down to Bedford on Wednesday when we had two programs! The first was a group of 30 kiddos from a YMCA. It was kids from Kindergarten to even some high schoolers! A wide age range is always difficult to keep entertained, but we did it. When they arrived, we took a bathroom break and split them up into three groups of twelve.
Then we took them into the tent to do stations. Paige and I were at the Victory Pin table! We preempted the Victory Pin making with the story about Winston Churchill and how he liked to throw up his fingers in a V for Victory. We made sure the kids understood that although the war hadn’t been won by the Allies yet, it was a propaganda piece for raising morale.
People started wearing “V Pins” to boost morale on the home front. So we made some of our own. I wish I had taken a picture, but basically we provided the kids with some sheets with different examples of victory pins. They got a blank small circle piece of paper to decorate based on an example or with their own creative liberties. Then, we glued an also decorated cut-out “V” on the bad of the circle so you could see the V sticking out from behind the circle. We had pins with a sticker on the back that we could stick to the paper combo and they wore their pins all day! It was a fun activity and the kids enjoyed the history behind it and the creativity of it.
Maggie did a homefront/propaganda activity at her table. First she talked about what the people did with their everyday items to help with the war. Then she talked about how the government tried to get the citizens involved through propaganda whether it be joining the armed forces or helping out at home like Rosie.
For the activity at her table, the kids got to create their own propaganda poster. They loved it and were really creative pulling from the different information that they learned about from Maggie’s short lecture.
At Felicia’s station, she did a shortened version of our regular program with the soldier’s gear! The most memorable moment of that program was hearing all of the “eews” when she talks about the soldiers getting seasick (they do it every single program!). The soldiers were packed 36 shoulder to shoulder in those Higgins boats on D-Day and couldn’t get to the edge to throw up. So, they puked in their helmets, rinsed them out when they could, and stuck them right back on their heads.
From a teaching standpoint, the short 15 minute stations were perfect for this group of kids with such a wide variety of age. They learned a lot as we found out in their newspaper articles they wrote at the end of the day, but they never got bored and we captured their attention for the whole time.
After they finished their activities, Paige and I took the kids on a tour. Paige took the lead on the tour and I got to watch and learn more for my final project. She did a fantastic job and the kids were very excited to learn about it all. Despite the heat, it was a successful first program.
After the YMCA group left, we went to the downtown office to have lunch and enjoy the air conditioning. We got to talk about what questions I had going forward with grad school and such. Paige goes to JMU and could inform me of the Secondary Education route as well as all the tests that go with that. Felicia and Maggie helped me with the whole History/Museum Studies/Public History aspects of that as we talked about UNC-G, which is where I think I want to go if I am lucky enough to get into the program. I left that day and bought practice books for the GRE, Praxis Subject Assessment Test and signed up for those two tests as well as the GRE yesterday and completed graduation/graduate school applications. The real world is coming up fast! Yikes. I am thankful we had the time to talk about it and for their guidance 🙂
After lunch, we had to head back up the hill for another program. This one was smaller and without the activities. Maggie gave the presentation about the soldiers gear and the kids ate it up. They love watching one of their classmates get dressed up in the gear and their appalled gasps when the classmate holds the weapons is hilarious!
This group was predominantly African American so Paige gave them a lesson about the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, which was an African American Battalion in WWII. I did not know anything about it before Paige taught them about it as part of her summer project. Anyways, basically this Battalion was one of blimps that helped crowd airspace so planes could not necessarily see the ground to cause harm to our soldiers. It is an interesting battle tactic to learn about and the kids (and myself) ate it up.
After we sent that group on a tour with Cam, another intern, we went back downtown to start cranking out posters for Family Day tomorrow (Saturday, July 18). We had 10 posters to get done and we got as many done as we could. I love crafting and had a lot of fun doing it! I made my poster about Australia. Since one of my activities from last week that I created (Week Six: Activities) I highlighted the cricket playing. I also decided to use recognizable Australian things to catch the kids’ eyes so they can say “oh hey it’s Nemo, this country/activity must be cool.” Right? I’m hoping so.
oh the places you'll go 