Summer Time Fun!
By Kelly Mason, Outreach Coordinator

While most people are loading the car with swimsuits, beach chairs, and towels, museum education staff are preparing for an action packed summer complete with wool Civil War uniforms, corsets, and activities for the whole family! One of the joys of a museum educator is the ability to create new ways to engage children. Most of my time as an educator is taken up throughout the year doing school programs for the masses. Whether I am dressed in my worker clothes discussing everyday chores of the Hoffman Hotel, or dressed in my Civil War ball gown opening students eyes to the woes of a war torn country, or even if I am dressed in beautiful Victorian attire talking about 19th century art, school programs take up a lot of time and tend to be fairly repetitive. (Need to cover those NC standards!) Don’t get me wrong, I love my job and love providing programs for school groups. Sometimes, I just long for a change of pace and summer provides that outlet.

Summer is a time for us to let our hair down (figuratively of course, since a respectable woman in the 19th century would not go around town with her loose locks!) and dig into some broader topics. We host multiple camps here at the museum throughout the summer months including our paid all day Civil War camp (water balloon battle included) and some paid half day camps including pottery and cartooning camp. We also provide programs for the county libraries: this year’s theme discussing inventions that changed Gaston County. (Very interesting stuff: look up Edison Hydro-Electric Dynamo! Better yet, stop by our museum and check it out!)

Our biggest undertaking for the summer is our Free Drop in Day Camp program that runs for 7 consecutive Thursdays. This year’s theme: Work and Life: Gaston County in the 1800’s. We provided programs that spanned topics such as merchants, farming, county court, school, textiles, and transportation. Kids experience a variety of interactive stations that often include games and crafts to bring the subject to life. Some of my favorite stations included laundry relay race, planting seeds, quill pen writing, playing the textile doffer game, and making our train lantern craft. I had the ability to change period clothing from week to week based on my activity and showcase the broad spectrum of life during the county in the 1800’s.

The most magical and rewarding time for a museum educator is to see the children come back, week after week, continuing to grow and learn, and most importantly having so much fun. My job is to bring history to life, to demonstrate to kids that history is not just a boring subject they study at school, but that history is all around them and helps to create the world that we live in today. It is a museum educator’s job to show how the past, present, and future are all intermingled and that it can be very rewarding and a lot of fun to discover! As the curtain closes on summer and we begin gearing up for hundreds of school children, we look back fondly on the past few months and feel a sense of accomplishment: we were able to keep kids active and learning! Mission accomplished! Great job education team!