WASILLA — Who says home-schoolers can’t have fun?
Just ask Davy Crockett, Laura Ingles and Billy the Kid — or at least a group of history savvy home-school kids who this week are showing their Western colors at a local Homeschool History Camp hosted by five families in Wasilla.
 J.J.HARRIER/Frontiersman Pioneer women at the Homeschool History Camp in Wasilla wait for lunch around the campfire Monday. |
“We wanted to get our kids together with other members of our group and put on an event that both teaches by experience and lets the kids have fun with acting out their parts,” Stavenjord said.
Thirteen home-school students, ranging in age from infancy to 14, took part in the annual week-long event to learn about and act out the history of the United States.
The students, from Wasilla and Palmer, researched this year’s Western expansion theme and each chose characters from the 1800s that had an impact on American culture. Each student then wrote essays about their characters and a range of topics, including the railroad, the Gold Rush, and Lewis and Clark expedition, then presented their findings to the camp. Each student designed and wore Western costumes of their alter-egos, finally building — with some parental help — a western town equipped with a jail, bank, mercantile and saloon on property shared by Mark and Sonja Stavenjord’s two-story home.
The result? A week of Western hoe-down fun and history in the making.
Homeschool History Camp began as an idea in 2005 when Stavenjord and Hartmann decided to bring their kids, all home-schooled, together for some fellowship matched with learning through experience. Their first year was a re-enactment of the Revolutionary War, and last year it was the Civil War.
Stavenjord and Hartmann are members of VCHE, a group of Christian families residing in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley and home educating their children with an emphasis on teaching Christian beliefs and moral values. Hartmann moved to Alaska three years ago and decided it was the best place in the world for home-schooling her kids and wanted to meet other moms like herself.
The families found each other and communicated via a Yahoo! e-mail chain, developing a network with other home-school families, which in return helped in organizing History Camp.
Inside the mercantile, Shayla Rasmussen, 12, is preparing items for purchase. The general store is stocked with canned foods, authentic candy jars, candles, lamps and everything the modern family could need in the 19th-century. For the week, Rasmussen is portraying Mary Ingles, the older sister from “Little House on the Prairie” and other Laura Ingles Wilder books.
“My younger sister wanted to be Laura [Ingles] for the camp, and my youngest sister wanted to be Carrie,” Rasmussen said. “It’s fun doing this as a family.”
In her research for History Camp, Rasmussen found the difficult thing to understand about Western families in the 1800s was that they didn’t have electricity to rely on.
Yesterday, the five families met in the early morning to begin projects based in the period theme, with Monday’s focus on the Wild West.
Over at Black Jack’s Saloon, students made currency pouches from leather pieces, string and synthetic bear claws to hold the beads, and special gold nuggets they’d earned from completing history-related tasks. They sewed with iron needles, pounded cow skins and discussed the task at hand, many helping each other with the difficult parts.
Kolten Brueggeman, a home-schooled fifth-grader, is dressed as Lewis of the exploration team Lewis and Clark. He said that so far he’s learned much about his character and the wild West in general.
“I got to learn about gold mining and cowboys,” Brueggeman said. “Lewis explored all over America and almost died, but he managed to live through it.”
“We chose history because we feel our children could learn by experience,” Hartmann said. “And by reenacting that time period, they can learn by bringing this history to life.”
Some students played their outlaw characters a little too well as toy rifles were put on lockdown at the bank after a brief morning scuffle.
“When the sheriff says you can have it, then you can have it,” said Hartmann to a disgruntled Billy the Kid.
After the morning activities, families gathered around the campfire, recited a prayer and students counted their beads to purchase cowboy tacos at the jail house. Nothing in life, even in the 1800s, is free.
“My kids absolutely love this,” said Kelly Caraway, mother of two home-schoolers. Caraway said her son Titus, (aka Billy the Kid) and daughter Kayla (aka Calamity Jane) are home-schooled so they receive the opportunity to focus on their main interests and to receive good socialization skills.
“We all commercial fish during the summer and this is one of the perks to home-schooling, in my opinion,” Callaway said.
Laura Rasmussen, mother of five, agrees.
“[Homeschooling] takes up a majority of my day,” she said. “But it’s worth it in the end. I love being the one who sees the light bulb go on in them when they learn something.”
Throughout the week, students will gather again each day to learn to make Western Indian drums and perform hatchet throwing, spike driving, traditional Indian fire dancing, go on a scavenger hunt, do laundry on a real washboard, reenact Oregon Trail history, and participate in pioneer racing and square dancing.
“We planned this all year long,” Stavenjord said. “We wanted to make this come alive for the kids, when in reality the kids came alive for us.”
Contact J.J. Harrier at 352-2269 or valleylife@frontiersman.com.
Comments
2 comment(s)Stacey Lowe wrote on Sep 26, 2007 10:04 AM:
Teressa Van Diest wrote on Sep 25, 2007 2:31 PM: