2/18/2009 11:37:00 AM A world of learning at Lawton
Lawton Elementary School fourth graders (from left) Nick Peterson, Efram Escarez, Marissa Valdivia Reagle and Kimbrie Hodges helped create a Native American longhouse in one of the school's hallways. Their teacher, Shirley Rybock has been creating hallway exhibits for four years.
Four years ago, Lawton students created a pyramid complete with tomb for mummies, hieroglyphics and replicas of artifacts.
It's amazing how far a little imagination can take you. And in Shirley Rybock's third/fourth grade class at Lawton Elementary School, imagination goes a long way.
For the four years, she and dozens of students, along with the invaluable help of parent volunteers such as Ingrid Peterson, have transformed an innocent hallway into the world where pharaohs rule, where bright tree frogs cling to canopies of expansive rainforests, and where Native Americans of the Northwest live, pray and dance.
Rybock and her students have used butcher paper, photos, drawings, streamers, markers and actual artifacts on loan from the Burke Museum to decorate the hallway just around her classroom into historical settings. The current incarnation is a Native American longhouse.
"I love doing hallway displays," said Rybock, who has been teaching students and adults for 27 years. "The whole longhouse has been so popular with the kids, they actually come in to learn and to read."
Rybock's students spent the last month learning the histories of local tribes, how they supported themselves, how they made things like canoes, fishing equipment, baskets and clothing.
They also learned about the interconnectedness between the natives and the land around them. "Almost everything here is made of cedar, the tree of life," said Efram Escarez, a Rybock fourth grader and curator of the exhibit. Escarez held up a bentwood box often made of cedar or yew trees, about as big as a square tissue box and used to keep food warm or to store items. Wood used to make the box was soaked in water until they became flexible and shapeable, Escarez said. He also showed a hook made from a yew tree and used to snag bottom-swimming halibut.
Another student curator, fourth grader Marissa Valdivia Reagle, showed off wedges often made from animal bones and antlers. She said the wedges helped natives split wood to make shingles for the longhouse, or for carving out canoes. She also showed the pelts hanging on the wall that natives made from beavers, rabbits and other local animals.
Classmate Nick Peterson stood inside the longhouse and pointed to a hole at the top. The fourth grader said the hole acted as a chimney for bonfires or when salmon were being smoked. Classmate Kimbrie Hodges, also in fourth grade, showed off the native loom used to make clothing. She and other classmates had already practiced weaving on the loom.
Students decorated the longhouse entryway with totem masks and symbols. They created drying racks for the salmon they made with paper and watercolors.
Last year students created a rainforest. They made a river out of strips of paper. Kids colored and designed indigenous bugs. Four years ago, Rybock dreamed up an Egyptian exhibit complete with pyramids, hieroglyphics, mummies and pharaohs. They did Sweden, too.
For this year's exhibit, the Burke Museum offered Rybock the use of native artifacts for two weeks for a mere $35. "A deal," Rybock said. The museum offers this service to all schools. So students get an authentic look at what it is they're studying. "It's made it real for them."
For the school's World Fair, March 19, Rybock's students and the rest of the student body will learn about different periods in American life. Rybock's class is studying the 1940s, and will be asked to interview relatives who lived through the decade.
Students last week were in full "swing" mode on the project and Rybock couldn't help but dance a little to the swing music playing on a CD player in the classroom.
