Ten-year-old Destin Poindexter is spending the week learning about Columbus during the Civil War era.
The Sale Elementary student is one of 38 academically gifted fourth graders from Sale and Caledonia elementary schools chosen to participate in Passport Week at the Mississippi University for Women. Senior education students at MUW — who are only one semester away from becoming student teachers — have put together programs incorporating language arts, math, science and the arts into lesson plans for fourth graders on the Civil War. MUW’s Education Department received an Appalachian Teaching Project grant to fund the program.
The program included a week of classroom learning at MUW, as well as a tour of the campus for selected students.
It’s good for both the kids and the university students, Assistant Professor of Education April Coleman said. The kids learn about social studies, which she said often gets lost in the shuffle of standardized testing and the core subjects of math and language arts.
“There’s not as much time to teach social studies,” she said. “And we know that having that in-depth social studies background is such an integral part of being an informed citizen, a participating citizen in our local community. So the goal (was) that the K-12 students would really get to delve into our local history more and understand that.”
For the future student teachers, the program allows them to create lesson plans integrating multiple subjects and see how those plans work in real classrooms with real students, Coleman said.
The students have seen everything from architecture to agriculture, as well as studied the day-to-day life in 1860s Columbus, through activities ranging from tours to art projects.
It’s been a fun week for Poindexter, who was excited to learn about 19th century transportation and the different way Civil War soldiers traveled.
“They used trains. They used wagons,” he said. “They used donkeys and horses to carry the wagons.”
Tuesday, Sale Elementary students took a campus tour, which was Poindexter’s favorite activity of the week. On the tour, he learned the legend of Mary, the ghost who allegedly haunts Callaway Hall on MUW’s campus.
“She was a nurse,” he said. “She was healing a soldier and they fell in love, but the soldier went back to war. And then she jumped off a clock and she died, and now she’s a ghost.”
Senior education student Paige West has enjoyed watching the fourth graders learn about how kids lived in the 19th century. In particular, she liked watching their reactions to learning that during the war, many schools closed so schoolmasters and even some students could fight.
“At first they were excited,” she said. “‘Oh, I would love to not have school!’ But then they’re like, ‘Oh, no … I would either have been in the war or I would have been home doing responsibilities like picking cotton.’ So then they kind of appreciated … the fact that they get to go to school.”
The kids will split into groups and make projects for the forthcoming Children’s Museum, which is expected to open in Columbus within the next few years. West’s group is making an ABC book specific to Columbus — “A” will be for “antebellum homes,” she said. Another group is putting together a picture book on Columbus architecture, while yet another group is building a cotton gin.
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