The organization will partner with eight more schools over the next two years as part of the ongoing commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.Īt the event Tuesday night, Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chairman Scott K. Students at four schools - including Smart’s Mill and schools in Harper’s Ferry, Charlottesville and Manassas - have participated in the project in the past several years, Wyatt said.
With the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the partnership launched the first school program in January 2009. The nonprofit organization had already created similar programs for summer camps in the area, including one in Loudoun, in which students assume the identities of people who lived during the Civil War, reenact pivotal moments in history and “decide for themselves what they would do in those situations,” Wyatt said. The program is the result of a 2008 request by the President’s Advisory Panel on Historic Preservation, asking that the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership bring its service-learning programs into classrooms, Wyatt said. I don’t know how much more you can bring history alive than that.” They were speaking the words of the characters as they were acting in the location where they lived. “They got to film in the house where her diary was found. “This is a house they drove by a million times, and never knew what went on there,” Wright said. Kimberly Wright, a communications teacher at Smart’s Mill who worked with the students throughout the four-month process, said Miller’s story was a perfect example of how learning about their community’s history can captivate students. “I spent much of my time offering my house as a respite for the soldiers of Ball’s Bluff,” Sophie says in her narration. The footage was shot at the Harrison House in Leesburg, where Miller lived during the war.
She dressed in period clothing and sat at a desk, pretending to write in a journal that wouldn’t be found for more than a century. Seventh-grader Sophie Frey portrays Miller in the film. The students were given access to primary-source documents from the period, including letters, articles and diaries like Virginia Miller’s. “When students go to a historic site, they can often see things that we adults miss, and they can often find parts of history that inform us all,” said Cate Magennis Wyatt, founder and president of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership. The goal of the program is to connect students to the history of their communities by giving them access to multimedia technology and expert guidance so they can create, produce and direct documentary films about what they have learned. One of six films premiered at the event, it was created by 133 Smart’s Mill seventh-graders as part of the multi-state Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership’s “Of the Student, by the Student, for the Student” program. On Tuesday night, before a standing-room-only crowd in the board room of the Loudoun County Government Center, Virginia Miller and the events of 150 years ago came to life again in a documentary-style film created by students at Smart’s Mill Middle School in Leesburg. The Civil War drew closer to her doorstep each day, close enough that she could hear cannon fire from the nearby Battle of Ball’s Bluff that October. The teenage daughter of a prominent doctor, she wrote about her family, a young soldier she liked and events unfolding in the world around her. Virginia Miller wrote her first diary entries in fall 1861, at the house where she lived on North King Street in Leesburg.
0 kommentar(er)
