Using the 10 R's

Ideas Galore for Schoolhouse Reenactment!
Does your country schoolhouse welcome school field trips? Do you have a curriculum you would care to share with groups seeking ideas? Nationwide, programs are alive and well offering the experience of teaching in and attending our restored one-room schools. Dedicated volunteers don period clothing to stage re-enactments and living history classes for our young visitors and enthusiastic adult groups as well. Schoolmarms and schoolmasters share their knowledge of country schooling in the most endearing settings, our schoolhouses, meticulously restored with furniture, artifacts, and a curriculum crafted by those same volunteers. Does this describe you?

​Welcome is the news that there are still groups restoring a schoolhouse whose goal is to serve local school children and help them step back into history. But, they ask...Where two we start? This question was posed to us recently by the Merrimack Historical Society in Merrimack, NH. They already own a beautiful one-room schoolhouse, but they are planning a new direction by offering regular living history classes. They are seeking ideas.

We will offer here for Merrimack, other seekers, and for our readers, a perfect guide for programming. Here are scores of ideas for your schoolhouse created by CSAA member, Susan Webb. It is a narrated video slide show she submitted for our 2021 CSAA Virtual Conference line-up and it is filled with resources. CSAA's  Susan Webb, "The Traveling Schoolmarm," was a master at such hands-on activities and she shared her passion for reenactment at many of our annual conferences and to historic groups across the country.

Sadly, Susan passed away in October 2023, but we honor her memory, knowledge, and creativity once more by sharing Using the Ten R's (of Reenactment) as she would have wished.
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Note: If you have a written curriculum you'd like to share with others, send it along to Susan Fineman (with our gratitude) and we will make it available to individuals seeking ideas. [email protected]
We will post your contribution on the CSAA Resources Page.