Lakeshore Museum Centers Field Trip!
THIS SOCIAL STUDIES TRIP SHOWS HOW OUR COMMUNITY (WEST MICHIGAN) HAS CHANGED OVER TIME - This is the trip we took last year and I plan on scheduling one for October, 2015, as well. We toured the Hackley and Hume houses which were both built around 1875. These two men were lumber barons, friends and business associates as well as huge philanthropists in Muskegon. They shared a barn in-between the houses. The barn had room for horses and carriages. The barn and both houses took two years to build and have been brought back to their original beauty. Both homes are richly carved and interesting Victorian style homes. The Hume house was decorated in a little later period, with the Hackley house decorated to better represent the late 1870's. Students learned many new vocabulary words such as parlor, pocket doors, dumb waiter and icebox. They learned how homes were heated in that time period. They saw the types of beds and dressers people used and the toys children played with. They also learned about the servants quarters and reasons why the servants used a separate stairs and why they used a pass-thru from the kitchen to the dining room, for example. In the third house around the corner, which is actually older, but decorated in the Depression Era style, we saw less opulence and learned that many people had to rent part of their homes to survive the Depression. The students pretended to cook with the play food in the upstairs kitchen. They contrasted the changes in the stove and iceboxes as well as beds and decor compared to the Victorian style houses. Then we visited the fire station that Mr. Hackley built because there were so many fires in Muskegon at that time (basically because everything was made of wood and heated with fireplaces). Students saw life-size horse replicas, old fire trucks, the trampoline that people jumped into to be saved, the horns that firefighters used to communicate, their leather helmets and equipment, as well as where they slept. After a sack lunch in the main museum auditorium, we toured the main museum. The downstairs level is a wonderful introduction to the Michigan History they will be learning in 3rd grade. We toured different Michigan habitats starting with 500 million years ago and working forward in time. Students walked through Michigan when it was an ocean, a jungle, covered in glaciers and finally a woodland forest. They saw timelines and models of animals in their habitats. We read aloud summaries together to better understand what they were seeing. We also had fun in a hands-on science exploration room. 2nd graders could put prepared slides under microscopes, use a whisper tube, listen to sound vibrations by whacking different tubes with paddles, lift heavy weights using pulleys and create a mist tornado by pushing a button. In the next room we journeyed with the peoples who have come to Michigan. Early natives that migrated 10,000 years ago are represented, then displays of Native Americans from the past 500 years, then early settlers. Students could walk into a pioneer cabin and push buttons to hear information on early peoples. We saw the importance of the logging industry to our state with original tools, a model of a saw mill and part of a saw mill factory on display. We could go inside a boat and see old photographs showing the importance of our lakes and rivers to transportation of peoples and goods. We traveled past displays that represented different groups of people that journeyed to West Michigan in the 1900's to present day. We concluded with a display of the importance of our agriculture, such as the apple crops. There was an additional exhibit upstairs on the human body and health. Check their website for more details: http://lakeshoremuseum.org/hours.html For our next field trip on May 26th, check out the information on the "Dates to Remember" page. |