Panning for Gold
Click the blue play arrow to hear me read aloud: Panning for Gold.
I took my kids on a field trip today to a place where folks dress up like the Gold Rush era and act out that the students are in the 1800’s. They learned history that applies to real life, of course the best kind there is to study! They learned not to whine, how to budget miner bucks, how to pan for real gold, how to budget and preserve food, how to work with others for a common good and a little about what a once mysterious 1800’s life was all about.
One of my students started to gripe and whine when they said it was time to do chores. The docent’s response was,
Well, you know what happens to kids here in the 1800’s who don’t do their chores? They don’t eat!
This was a quite effective approach made more so by the fact that it was an hour past our normal lunchtime and all the kids were starving.
They learned that people didn’t always take showers and they got to imagine what the trail might have smelled like. They also earned the prices for things were high. They were given $80 to start with and by the end they realized they barely had enough to make it through a week.
They got to pan for gold. They put actual gold nuggets into the riverbank and the kids were thrilled to find them one after the other. One thought provoking thing was how hard it was panning for the hour we did and realizing that some men back then panned all day and often had NOTHING to bring back to feed his family!
It was hot on the dusty trail and the kids learned what it was like before SpongeBob. Most were surprised to find out how much work 9 year olds were expected to do. If you ran out of food, you had to barter what you had for flour or other food staple items.
Walking through the ghost town and doing real projects as crafts really made the experience vivid for the kids. I think considering history this way is an invaluable experience for your formative minds these days.
Click the blue play arrow to hear me read aloud: Panning for Gold.
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Tags: education, photography, Teaching
I'm Damien Riley, author and teacher. Here you'll find "think outside the box" posts on psychology and inspiration. 
A day to remember. I want to go!
What a cool experience! I’d love to take my kids on that sort of thing.
Wow! I wish we had school experiences like this! How cool! I often think how interesting it would be to go on the field trips I went on as a kid now as an adult. Some of the fascination, I’m sure, was totally lost on my youth….
This kind of reminds me of the Kid Nation set. Have you been watching that show? The psychology of the whole thing is interesting to me. That really is an amazing bunch of kids, too…
Jessica
Hey Jessica. Yeah, I have seen that show. I think some of it is clearly coached and staged but a lot of it is real from the kids and that’s the appeal it has. I guess because I work with little people all day I’m more critical of that show. Some things kids know and do and others they clearly do not. We watched it a few episodes and it got boring for us anyway.
meanwhile . . . this field trip was awesome. A lot of the pictures were lost on my batteries dying :( so I’m glad you got the vibe on what I had at the beginning!
i love field trips like that. can’t say i’ve ever been on one of those though. i recently visited the log cabin village here in fort worth and it was awesome! they have a program for schools where volunteers will dress up in period clothing and such. i’m just a fan of that kind of experience. thanks for sharing.