Connecting to the past: Students learn what life was like in Colonial times - By David Kronke | Tribune-StarNov 22, 2024

Tribune Star/Joseph C. Garza

Sugar Creek Consolidated Elementary School fifth-grade teacher Kathryn Rademacher-Smith’s classroom is the rare one that boasts a kitchen with a fridge and oven adjacent to the desks, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that on this Friday its air is aromatic with the scent of cinnamon.

​Students have baked themselves apple turnovers and created butter by shaking buttermilk in little jars. It’s all for a little snack they’ll enjoy later in the afternoon.
Welcome to Colonial Day, which has become an annual Consolidated tradition allowing students to set aside their textbooks for a day and make not just pastries but candles, ink, Native American rattles and write with old-fashioned quill pens.
The event comes courtesy of a $750 grant from the Vigo County Education Foundation.
Foundation Executive Director Jane Nichols explained, “We raise funds to empower teachers to bring more creative, hands-on learning to their classrooms. These are the things kids remember. This is what’s important — the experiences, the extra things. Are they going to remember the tests they take? No. But they’re going to remember making butter.”
Principal Suzanne Marrs agreed.
“It’s just a way to connect with the past and really bring the history of Thanksgiving to life for our kids,” she said. “They’re really starting to learn what life was like at that time. It gives them real-world experience.
“Any time in education when you can actually use your hands and have real-life experiences helps you to connect to what you’re really learning,” she added, noting that the turnover aroma was wafting up to the classroom above them, no doubt making students there pretty jealous. “They’re getting an authentic experience that they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.”


In Kelsie Rhoads’ classroom, students are making candles, as well as ink from blueberries. Pupils melted wax in slow cookers and added essential oils like eucalyptus and lemon. They dipped a wick into the melted wax and then doused them in water repeatedly, then hung their creations to dry.
“When they get home, they can light it like a real candle,” she said.
Sarah Pigg and her husband Daniel, owners of Sycamore Winery, are in Rhoads’ classroom helping the students there — including their son Elliot — create the candles. If winemaking and candle dipping were to appear in a Venn diagram, their circles would overlap at no point whatsoever.
“I just learned how to make candles this morning,” Sarah said, adding wryly, “I consider myself definitely an expert after about an hour. We didn’t know what we were doing, but it’s fun just to help.”
Upstairs in Jennifer Price’s classroom, students created Native American rattles — at a powwow earlier in the day, they learned what the rattles were used for, and now they were making them themselves. Price said Colonial Day is quite the departure from an average day in the classroom.
“Typically, we’re learning our math or reading at our seats, not a whole lot of movement,” she said. “And this is learning the typical day in the life of someone from Colonial times, so they get to move around and get to do a lot of hands-on [work] which is really important for learning. Having fun in a different classroom environment — they physically get to make apple [turnovers] and butter.”
Fifth grader Connor Trout proudly showed off his rattle, a stick wrapped in yarn and accented with beads. He called Colonial Day “mostly excitement and fun” and said he learned about “the games they played, like marble rolling. They wrote with a feather, which was really cool.”
Almost as cool as doing the exact same thing 400 to 500 years later.
David Kronke can be reached at 812-231-4232 or at [email protected].