The Wax Museum

As the school winds down and Maura prepares to third grade her school work focuses on big projects and fun. Tomorrow she has her big fieldtrip for the year, a trip to Plimouth Plantation where she will learn about the Pilgrims and their Wampanoag neighbors. I expect she’ll have a good time, too. There was no call for parents to chaperone this year, so I won’t be going.

Yesterday was another of Maura’s end of school year activities. For their big end-of -ear project the students in the third grade did book reports on biographies and presented their reports on posters which were displayed in the gym. Then they dressed up as their historical subjects and answered questions that they had prepared in advance.

Maura chose Pocahontas as her subject. Her poster told the familiar story of how she saved the life of John Smith, helping the first English settlement at Jamestown to survive. It also told how she later married another Englishman, John Rolfe, and traveled with him to England where she died, leaving behind a young son.

Parents were invited to come see the wax museum, which was the name the school gives to the display of posters with their costumed presenters. I went to see Maura in the Pocahontas costume that her mother made for her. She looked very cute in it. She did an excellent job answering the three questions she had prepared and written on her poster. She also answered  a few other questions people asked about Pocahontas’s life, showing that she had learned about her subject, not just memorized a few facts. She even managed to answer some of them in character. I was very impressed with her presentation and I’m proud of her.