FreshPlans Visits Farmers Markets
We went to a city market and a country one. Check out our Farmers Market Lesson Plans, too!
FreshPlans Interviews an Entrepreneur
Dr. Douglas Hutchings tells us about his experience as an entrepreneur.
FreshPlans Visits a Scientific Research Lab
We got to go to the High Density Electronics Center at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville. Dr Douglas Hutchings took us in to see the place where he and his colleagues work on their innovative solar energy invention.
Some parts of the lab look a lot like an ordinary office. They have chairs and worktables and computers. However, the parts behind yellow plastic are “clean rooms.” They have no dust in them, and people must wear special clean room suits to go in them. There’s a “Gowning Room” where the scientists put on their gear and then go directly into the clean room so they don’t bring anything in with them.
Dr. Hutchings explained that some of the parts they work with are only as big as a grain of dust, so any dust would ruin their products.
The clean rooms are covered with plastic and filled with interesting things like lasers and special machines. Dr. Hutchings told us about a 3D printer, a machine that can print out three dimensional objects the way a printer at schools prints out worksheets.
We’re not sure what this machine does. Different researchers use the HIDEC lab, including both scientists from the university and scientists working at businesses in town.
This is a list of “prechecks”: reminders of things to check before beginning to use the machine. The HIDEC lab has some dangerous machines and chemicals, and the equipment is expensive and delicate, so everyone is very careful.
These lights are alarms that go off in case of any kind of danger.
In our science classes, we learn about safety procedures and the scientific method and we do experiments. It’s interesting to see where working scientists do their experiments.
FreshPlans Visits a Grist Mill
…a what? Long ago, millers were very important people in any village. A mill would take the grain farmers grew and grind it into flour or meal so people could bake with it.This essential step in the progression from raw materials to finished goods makes a good lesson in economics, and the mill wheel itself is a great start for a look at energy or force and motion. Of course, this is also a good history lesson.
War Eagle Mill was built in 1832 to serve the needs of pioneers in our area. It is one of the few pioneer era grist mills still working today, and we feel fortunate to be able to visit and see how grains used to be made into flour in the past. We’re also glad War Eagle Mill still operates today, because this old fashioned method makes for very delicious baking.
Without a mill, people had to grind up grains themselves. Where we live, this would usually have been corn. War Eagle Mill shows the tools people used, and even lets people try them out.
Kids can use a stone to grind different types of corn so they can discover the differences among the different types. They’ll also discover what hard work it was to grind up enough to feed the family!
The grinding stone has a bowl in it where the stone has been worn away by the grinding, and of course that means that very small particles of stone ended up in the meal or flour, increasing the mineral content. When we visited the Ancient Village at the Cherokee Cultural Center, we saw (and posted a photo for you) the other type of grinding tool: a hollowed log with a wooden stick. This took more muscle power, but leverage helped. Have students try grinding dried corn with different kinds of tools to compare the effects. An ordinary kitchen morter and pestle is an easy option.
A 19th century mill like the War Eagle would use a millstone like this one to grind the meal, and the grinding was powered not by human strength but by water. This is how it’s still done at the War Eagle Mill today.
The grain would go down through the pipes into the mill, and the stones would be turned by the machinery you can see above. The machinery was in turn powered by the mill wheel. Again, this is still how War Eagle Mill mills grains.
Water from War Eagle creek is caught in the paddles of the wheel and turns the wheel. Since it is attached to the mill inside the building, the mill wheel makes the mill turn, and grinds the grain. You can easily make a model water wheel in the classroom, and this is also a good time to look at gears. We like WaterHistory.org’s page on the history of water wheels for the science connection. In fact, lessons on energy fit in very well here.
The mill wheel works the same way that the paddle wheel on a boat like the Steamboat Arabia works. The mill race has a lot of power from the movement of the water, and the mill harnesses that power and uses it.
Modern mills usually use electricity to run their mills, and their mills are quite different from War Eagle, but the principle is the same. Grains like corn and wheat are ground up into flour so that they can be used for baking. War Eagle has jars of different grains, including quinoa and other grains that are newer to us, and the flours and meals they can be milled into.
They take those grains and meals and bake them into traditional foods like cornbread, pies, and cinnamon rolls which you can eat upstairs in their restaurant.
They also have displays of artifacts from their history there. On the day we visited, there was a lady who had been born in 1926 having beans and cornbread at the mill, and she told us all about how she had used similar items as a child. We’re not children, but we might not have been able to guess the purposes of all the objects we saw, so we were glad to have the information.
At War Eagle Mill, you can buy flour and meal and things like that, so we brought some home to use for our Thanksgiving baking. In the picture below, you can see some things we still use today: flour and meal ground in the traditional way at the grist mill, my grandmother’s cookbook from the 1940s, my great-grandmother’s dough bowl hand carved for kneading bread dough, and her hand carved rolling pin for rolling out pie crusts.
For young children, just seeing how things were long ago can be very intriguing. Many urban children have no idea where bread comes from, besides the grocery store. Following grains from the farm to the table is a good study for elementary school students, and middle school and high school students should be ready to consider how automation of grinding would impact the lives and work of the pioneers. In our region, this would include both European American settlers traveling West from the colonies and Cherokee settlers taking up more modern technology. Bring in your region’s local history as well — chances are, the transition from home grinding to the use of a grist mill took place where you live, too.
FreshPlans Goes to Crystal Bridges
FreshPlans Visits the Art Museum
We were among the first visitors at the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. It’s actually still under construction, but it was still a wonderful field trip.
We approached the museum along a half mile Art Trail which has sculptures along it like this one, “Shore Lunch” by Dan Ostermiller. Alice Walton, whose idea the museum was, said, “We hope children will crawl all over him” in an interview with the New Yorker, and we saw lots of children doing just that.
In fact, Crystal Bridges is one of the most kid-friendly art museums we’ve ever visited. Check out their educational programs if you’re in the vicinity, or use their very nice online connection for a virtual field trip when you study American art.
The museum is a series of structures on water. They’re very open, with lots of glass, so they look like bridges of crystal on the water.
Inside the museum are galleries of paintings and sculptures from the earliest Colonial times to the present day, all by American artists.
We enjoyed seeing rare books and artifacts from the time periods of each gallery, as well.
We liked being able to come up close and really look at the exhibits, too. We thought we’d show you some of our favorite paintings, but in the end we couldn’t choose. There are so many wonderful works of art that we can’t pick. We made a slideshow instead:
A visit to an art museum is an essential part of learning about art (and remember, the earth without art is just “eh”), and many kids only have the opportunity to visit art museums through their schools. We hope you’ll encourage your school to plan a field trip to an art museum.
Here are some other resources for virtual art field trips:
