Educational Programming

The Newtown History Center staff is pleased to offer these educational programs to 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders in the region around Stephens City. This region includes all of Virginia’s Frederick County and the City of Winchester public schools, Clarke County public schools and Warren County public schools. We also offer these programs to students of Berkeley and Jefferson County public schools in West Virginia and the greater Strasburg area in the northern portion of Shenandoah County, Virginia. Please call (540) 869-1700 for more details.

Old Tools as Simple Machines
A School Outreach Program Designed for Elementary School Students
Grades 3rd – 5th
The cost: $1 per participating student.

Newtown History Center staff will present the program at your school wearing period costume representing what common people wore in the early 1800s. They will illustrate learning points with antique tools representing a variety of trades and will discuss their uses by various craftsmen of the period.

Students will be given the opportunity to imagine the experiences of the tradesmen who used these tools to produce goods and perform repairs on existing products.

This program is designed to assist teachers in their instructional efforts with students who are learning the principles of force, motion, and energy outlined under section 3.2 of the Virginia Science Standards of Learning. Students will learn to identify old tools used in the pre-industrial era as types of simple and compound machines. The program will also help teach History and Social Science Standards of Learning (under section 3.7) by discussing how early American tradesmen used natural resources (like water, iron, wood, and coal), human resources (fellow laborers and slaves), to produce goods and services for consumers. The program will also address section 3.8 by illustrating how specialization (being an expert in one job, product, or service) and interdependence (different specialist tradesmen needing each other) in the production of goods and services was a normal way of doing business for early American tradesmen in the pre-industrial era.

The Great Wagon Road and Westward Expansion
A School Outreach Program Designed for Elementary School Students
Grades in 4th and 5th
The cost: $1 per participating student

Newtown History Center staff will present the program at your school wearing period costume representing what common people wore in the early 1800s. They will illustrate curriculum points with reproduction period maps that students will learn how to read and will use to plan immigration and transportation routes just as travelers and emigrants would have in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

This Program is deigned to assist teachers in their instructional efforts with students who are in the Virginia Studies and United States History to 1877 units of the Virginia History and Social Science Standards of Learning. The presentation will include discussion of the Shenandoah Valley as a geographic corridor for early American immigration to the South and West. Students will be able to see how early Americans perceived the region through maps (sections VS.1.i, VS.2.b and V.S.6.c) and the role that the Great Wagon Road played in the early American westward movement.

Limitations of early transportation technology and the difficulty mountain ranges posed to travelers will be discussed. The program will also address the features of trans-Appalachian geography (US1.2.b & c) that early American immigrant to the West would have found desirable.

Objects as Primary Sources: Historical Detective Work
A School Outreach Program Designed for Elementary School Students
5th Grade
The cost: $1 per participating student

Newtown History Center staff will present the program at your school wearing period costume representing what common people wore in the early 1800s. They will bring a variety of local historical objects from the museum’s collection for students to examine.

These artifacts will be used by the students to compare and contrast historical events, draw conclusions, and make accurate generalizations, as well as to interpret ideas and events from different historical perspectives. This program is designed to assist teachers in their instructional efforts with students who are beginning to develop the skills outlined in section VS.1 of the Virginia History and Social Science Standards of Learning.

As indicated, the main focus is to help students learn how to identify and interpret artifacts as primary source “documents.” This exercise will also help them understand the general differences between primary and secondary sources in the study of history.

In the end, students will have a better understanding of how museum curators “read” artifacts to learn the stories about the people behind them.