Down the hall, children are reading textbooks published in the 1980s. They are discussing current events based on newspapers and magazines printed in 1991, computing math problems from work sheets photocopied that morning in the school office and wearing clothes typical of North Shore children in the 1990s.
But inside the multipurpose room at Deer Path Elementary School in Lake Forest, 1991 becomes more and more remote.
”Close your eyes,” Time Machine volunteer Lee Gantz tells a group of kindergarteners. ”We are going back to the first half of the 20th Century, when your grandparents were children. Keep your eyes tightly shut. We`re going back a little further to the time of the Pilgrims. Now let`s go further back to Columbus and 1492. Okay. Now are you ready to go way back?”
With an imaginary bump and appropriate noises from Gantz, the students land in Egypt, 2500 B.C.
They made the imaginary time and space leap via an apparatus that resembles a colorful, beady-eyed vacuum cleaner hooked up to a high-intensity lamp with a kitchen clock thrown in.
The pupils are Lake Forest Elementary District 67 ”time travelers”
participating in the district-wide Time Machine program. Their task for the day is to make paper as similar as possible to the papyrus used in ancient Egypt. When they return to Egypt on another trip, the pupils will learn firsthand about mummification, preserving bodies.
Other classes travel to different times and places according to their grade level with the aid of their own, highly individualistic time machines.
At the district`s Cherokee School, Christmas lights start blinking on a silver-coated box. It is time to travel.
Third-grade students sitting expectantly on the floor feel time brushing by their faces as a hair-dryer-type attachment blows the dust of the ages across the room.
These time travelers already have visited the court of Louis XIV and are ready to start back but want to make a couple of quick stops at favorite time periods before returning to Lake Forest, 1991.
A child puts his hand in the time machine and pulls out a mummy. Murmurs of ”Ancient Egypt” pass from child to child as they recall bits of information about the period. They visited the pyramids back in kindergarten. Then a medieval shield is found in the machine. Talk switches to the Middle Ages. That was 1st grade.
”They remember facts they learned back in kindergarten,” says Patei Dittman, a volunteer Time Machine teacher.
Her co-worker, Sharon Golan, who coordinates the Time Machine program at Cherokee explains that sometimes the group sets the time machine for periods visited at earlier grade levels ”just for fun.”
And that is all Genie Shields, creator of the Time Machine program, needs to hear to know she is accomplishing her objectives: to make history fun by making it ”real” for the students.
Shields, a Lake Forest artist, teacher and school volunteer, developed the Time Machine program about nine years ago because she was dissatisfied with the lack of focus and continuity in the district`s Picture Lady program. ”Picture Ladies” were mothers who took artwork to the schools and gave brief talks on the paintings and the artists.
”I wanted a program that would grow and could be embellished every year but one where the basic work would be done and stay the same every year at each grade level rather than be unconnected and exist in a vacuum,” says Shields, who once chaired the Picture Lady program at Lake Forest`s Everett School.
Once she started developing the curriculum, however, the project grew in scope to encompass more than art as displayed on canvas. It embraced Shields` philosophy: Art ”reflects” the times.
”Teaching should be done in a multidisciplinary way. Even though this started as an art program, I wanted it to be much broader than just art. And it is broader. It is cultural. It is history. It is art,” Shields says.
Another of her goals, sharing the program with other schools, is also beginning to happen. Shields and Lake Forest Time Machine teachers held workshops last year for volunteers from Lake Forest Country Day School and neighboring Lake Bluff Elementary District 65. She calls the program ”Time Travelers” in some of those schools.
But to this conqueror of time and place, expanding the program to other Lake Forest schools and to Lake Bluff is not sufficient. ”I want to share the program with schools throughout the area, maybe the country,” Shields says.
Until that happens, she concentrates her energies on teaching one of the periods and training Lake Forest and Lake Bluff program volunteers.
Volunteers form the heart of the program. Instead of costing the district teacher hours and budget dollars, the program is run by parents and paid for by the district`s Association of Parents and Teachers.
By running the program only one day a week in each class in kindergarten through 4th grade, the volunteer`s visit becomes a special occasion. And the Time Machine supplements rather than supplants a district`s social studies and art units.
Events, styles and inventions of the past are translated into terms children today can understand, explains Mary Schlott, the parents association volunteer who coordinates Time Machine for Sheridan School.
”Children today don`t think of the people they read about in history books as being alive. This program makes history personal,” Schlott says.
To make each period ”real” to the students, the program focuses on
”something that is important-something that children can bring back with them as a fact,” she adds.
Schlott, who can recall a dozen noteworthy facts from her research as a Time Machine teacher last year offers such tidbits as ”Ancient Egyptians would take moldy bread and rub it with fat from a hippopotamus and then put the concoction on wounds, like a salve. This was a source of penicillin.
”And in Benjamin Franklin`s time, buttons were a sign of prosperity. The more buttons you wore on your waistcoat, the more prosperous you were.”
One project Schlott saw as particularly significant was paper making and its use in ancient Egypt. ”Each piece of papyrus took so long to make it was highly valued-not like today`s indiscriminate use of paper. In kindergarten, when children find that it takes them almost 45 minutes to make one sheet of paper, suddenly paper has more value to them. It puts it into perspective for them,” she says.
After starting their time travel as kindergartners in ancient Egypt, 1st graders are ready to move up their chronometer. They send the Time Machine to Europe during the Middle Ages.
Life takes on a serious, troubling aspect as the children, garbed in coarse burlap and fine brocade, experience class distinctions between peasants and nobility through the use of food, activities, dress and conversation.
But fun prevails when students make stained-glass artifacts, participate in knighting ceremonies and are allowed to forget their 20th Century Lake Forest table manners with a rousing, ”messy” medieval feast. ”That is where our term `mess hall` comes from,” Golan says.
Moving up in time, 2nd grade students exit their machine at the 15th and 16th Centuries. There they encounter famous people such as Christopher Columbus and visit Renaissance Italy.
At Sheridan School, Columbus takes out his job list because he wants to hire hearty hands to man his ships. ”But he warns about the hardships of exploration,” says volunteer teacher Jane Byman, who plays Columbus.
As part of their Renaissance experience, the 2nd graders make florentine paper that they will use as end sheets in their book-binding project.
Another project finds them ”lying down on the job.” Lying on their backs, students try to color pictures taped to the underside of their desks Michelangelo style.
Second graders also obtain a perspective of 16th Century life from their peers. A time machine reversal brings a couple of ”Renaissance children” to their class.
Two students dressed in 16th Century costumes appear in the classroom loaded with period garments for their 20th Century friends to try on. Well coached, they also come loaded with facts about their homes and lifestyles and questions about objects they view with amazement in the 1991 classroom.
”What is that?” asks one Renaissance child pointing to the electric lights. ”We try to include what people did not have years ago,” Byman says. Imagining lifestyle differences between past centuries and now is an important part of the Time Machine curriculum.
Third grade time travelers get an inkling of 17th and 18th Century North American and French lifestyles when the Time Machine lands them there as pirates, traders and ship builders, Louis XIV court society members and French revolutionaries. Students hoist the Jolly Roger, visit with Benjamin Franklin and don masks and wigs popular at Versailles.
Queen Victoria`s England with its high tea and industrial changes marks the 4th grade destination.
In the Time Machine program, students ”learn what their lives would be like” if they lived during the time they are visiting, Byman explains.
”The Renaissance children are asked to describe their homes, what they do, what they eat. They answer that their houses are crowded together, narrow, dark. Simple questions, simple answers,” Byman says.
But rather then memorize facts, the object of Time Machine is to ”pique children`s interest and curiosity” in a period, Schlott says.
Byman agrees, saying, ”If later on in college these students have an opportunity to take Western civilization, maybe they will do so because they remember that period was interesting.”
