Students spend 'day of pretend' at pioneer schoolhouse

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) - Walking up the hill to the Honey Creek Schoolhouse is like taking a field trip back in time.

On a frosty fall morning, students visiting the schoolhouse are welcomed inside as an old stove warms the room, filling it with the cozy smell of woodsmoke. They slide into iron-frame desks with wooden tops, heavily inscribed with the initials and doodles of generations of children who came before them.

Exercises are worked on slates or with ink pens and inkwells, and a morning treat of hot cocoa is passed out and sipped from tin cups.

When students are told to put the date at the top of their papers, they write "November 10th, 1888."

Wearing a bonnet and apron, Heidi Horton looks at her class of second-graders at the Honey Creek Schoolhouse last Thursday and calls roll: "Who do I have from the Knox family?" A small boy stands up. "Good morning. I heard you've been a big help with the animals at home, not just your own, but your neighbor's animals while they were sick."

The boy giggles. His family doesn't own any animals.

Horton continues down the list of visiting students provided to her by the class's real teacher, Tyler Ness. As she calls the Templeton Elementary students' names, she asks each one a question about their lives: how their cows are doing, how many eggs their chickens laid that morning, whether they had chopped wood or churned butter the night before. She asks one or two to fetch a piece of wood from the pile outside, or to sweep the floor with a handmade broom. The students rise curiously, eager to hear the narrative Horton will give their Honey Creek alter egos. They usually play right along, telling her about bonnets they are making or the recent wagon journeys they have taken.

Horton, the Honey Creek coordinator for the Monroe County Community School Corp., calls Honey Creek visits "experiential learning through history" - but the more fun name for it, she said, is "a day of pretend."

Visits to Honey Creek schoolhouse are intended to give students a firsthand lesson of what it was like to live and attend school in the 1800s. There has been a school in its current location, in a meadow on the hill above Low Gap Road, since 1854. The school as visitors know it today was built in 1921.

But while the building itself might be slightly more modern, the pioneer experience is still historically authentic. According to the school's nomination form for the National Register of Historic Places, prepared by then-MCCSC administrative assistant David Staver, "the educational experience at Honey Creek was more like that of the 1870s" until the 1940s.

Students started their day by climbing the hill to the school and ascending the school's bell tower to ring the bell. Under Horton's instruction, the day included penmanship lessons with old-fashioned ink pens, singing "Good Morning to You" and learning to bow and curtsy.

"Remember, we want to use our 1888 manners today," she told them.

She also led the students in a recitation lesson, reminding them that in the 1800s, many students couldn't afford books of their own. Anything they learned, she said, had to stay in their heads.

The rustic schoolroom is decorated with old books - many of which were donated by former Honey Creek students - globes and faded pictures and portraits, including two large sketches of presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. There is a glass case filled with taxidermied birds, while fallen honeycombs sit on the windowsill.

A faded picture of a small girl in a pioneer outfit sits on Horton's desk. It's a picture of Horton herself on her first visit to Honey Creek as a Fairview Elementary student. Her teacher, Pamela Rainey, who now teaches at Grandview Elementary, snapped it during her class's visit, and Horton has treasured it ever since. She only visited Honey Creek once, but when she graduated from Indiana University and the part-time job for the schoolhouse coordinator came up, she couldn't resist the temptation.

Visits are a one-time occasion for MCCSC students, who trek to the schoolhouse in either the second or fourth grade. Horton spends plenty of planning time in her office at Unionville Elementary, doing research, creating crafts and rotating out the activities and artifacts. No two visits to Honey Creek are ever the same, and she adjusts her curriculum to fit the age of her visitors and what they are learning in their regular classes.

Horton's job was made possible by the 2010 MCCSC referendum, which replaced slashed state education funding with a tax increase in the district of 14 cents per $100 of assessed property value. Restoring Honey Creek School visits was part of MCCSC's campaign promise, at the urging of parents and community members, many of whom had visited Honey Creek while they were in school. Thanks to voters approving the 2016 referendum, continuing the tax at a lower rate, Horton will get to continue leading students in a romp through the past for another six years.

Horton led her Templeton Elementary class outside for recess and showed them how to play with several period toys. Before long, kids were tossing embroidery hoops to each other using wooden rods in a game of "graces," or wobbling around the schoolyard on stilts. She said she is always surprised how much children raised on video games end up enjoying the older toys. Some days, when the weather is nice, she even takes them on brief hikes and teaches them to do leaf rubbings.

"I just think it's important, just the experience of seeing the differences of the way people used to live," she said.

Before lunch, kids ran to take bathroom breaks in the outdoor privies and to wash their hands and tin cups at the pump, where they took turns lifting the handle. It's a lot of work without indoor plumbing and electricity, but "it looks actually pretty fun," said 8-year-old Marissa Matlock.

Even the teachers enjoy trips to Honey Creek. Ness and chaperone Jacqueline Casebeer donned their own aprons and bonnets and waited for their own turns at the pump. It was Ness' first year coming to Honey Creek, but Casebeer, who teaches fourth grade, volunteered.

"It's my favorite field trip," she said. "(The students) are very engaged. This is how kids should learn: hands-on and interactive."

The kids, charging around the yard before a lunchtime picnic, seemed to be having too much fun to know that they were learning. Balancing on stilts, Taliyah Holland, 7, told Horton, "I really like this school. I wish we had a school like this."

And Horton said, "I hear that every day."

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Source: The (Bloomington) Herald Times, http://bit.ly/2fs82Bf

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Information from: The Herald Times, http://www.heraldtimesonline.com