Our third graders have been hard at work researching people from local communities in North Carolina that made an impact on their community. We included people such as State Librarians that started bookmobiles to local communities, founders of local universities, people who worked for equal rights, philanthropists, and others. This was a topic that was tough to find information appropriate for the kids about, but thanks to NCpedia, we found several good articles. The articles were sometimes a little over the kids heads, but not so much that we could not get through them. Once, they had their information, we researched what clothes would have looked like in the time periods their people lived in from sites like this and this, then the students created a wax museum! Other classes came through and were able to hear the “wax” figures give a talk about their life and how they made a difference in their community. Here are some pictures from the day, but the kids were all so great it is hard to just put a few pictures! (They had a choice between dressing up or creating a face card to hold up.)
Tagged: Biography
CCES Media Matters 
My 5th graders just did a wax museum project too. I love the idea of the creating a face card. I plan on sharing you post with my 5th grade teachers so they can offer the choice of a face card next year. So creative!
Thank you! I am glad you can use it!
Hooray! We love this and are glad the students found information they could use in NCpedia! Some articles that may be more approachable in NCpedia come from the NC Museum of History’s Tar Heel Junior Historian magazine. A list of all of them may be found at: http://ncpedia.org/category/entry-source/tar-heel-juni.
If you have the assignment they had written up, please feel free to share it with us. We’d love to post it on NCpedia in case other educators or media specialists wanted to recreate the fun!
Michelle Underhill, State Library of NC
Thanks for checking out our project! I will be sure to let the kids know you stopped by. Thanks for the link! I will try to write something up to share with you soon.
It will be wonderful to have that write-up! Thank you so much! I’ve also sent your post to UNC Press, since it looks like some of the articles the students used were from their Dictionary of North Carolina Biography series (which we are integrating into NCpedia.)
Thanks again!
[…] you saw in my previous post about the third grade wax museum, we have been researching local people in history. One class wanted to take it a step further and […]