Mrs. Shedd's Fabulous Fifth Grade Classroom: Past Highlight

During the month of January our class participated in a genealogy residency with Vermont author and historian Natalie Kinsey-Warnock. She was with the fourth and fifth graders for a total of 7 days. On the first day, children learned a little about her personally, beginning with the fact that she lives with 10 dogs, 17 cats and 2 horses. Natalie brought several beautiful quilts that she designed and her grandmother sewed. Several of the quilts are connected to books that she has written and she shared that as well as other family stories.

Another topic on the first day was the history of photography. Natalie brought cameras and photos from various time periods and taught the children how to identify photos including daguerreotype, ambroytype, tin type, calling cards and more. Students were given a collection of photos and asked to sort them in order from earliest to the newest type. They were also taught that you can identify photos based on fashion and hair styles.

Natalie also showed the students how to fill out a family tree. This is one tool she shared to help the children begin to capture family history.

On the second day Natalie was with us we learned about what a census is and how it can help us learn about our ancestors. Natalie read a wonderful book, Tricking the Tallyman by Jacqueline Davies. This book takes place in Tunbridge and is about the way the 1790 census was tallied. Students learned about the 72-year rule and how the census is not released to the public for this period of time.

We watched a short video clip called “100 Years of Fashion in 100 Seconds.” We learned about primary and secondary sources and what an artifact is. Natalie shared many items from a diary and an apron to a WWII ration book and pieces of a plane crash on her family farm. She also told us a story about some local teenage boys and their adventure around the plane crash.

During the next session Natalie began to work with us on research, showing us several free websites to help with our research. Below are these links:

Findagrave.com

Vermontcivilwar.org

Chronicalingamerica.com

Heritagequestonline.com username: ODXQCW9KWH

Password: GREEN

Students are also able to use ancestry.com at school. We have a subscription for a period of time.

We visited the town clerk’s office with Natalie to learn about the records that are stored there. Students have been working on a research project for the past couple of weeks and have been finding amazing information for their projects. We have ancestors from WWII and the Civil War, recipients of Medals of Honor and more. Students have been busily writing and scrapbooking birth certificates, census records, death certificates and many other documents. These binders will be shared on Wednesday, February 17^th at the Author’s Celebration.