Schedule

Day 1:  Teacher will introduce the grant; primary source documents, tools, etc. Students will brainstorm in a large group,  what they know about cemeteries.  Using a K W W L chart, students will log the brainstorming session.

As a class, students will make  a list of everything they think they know about cemeteries and list it in the KNOW column. The focus is on the facts, not myths, bloods, guts or scary stories. In the WHAT column, you will make a list of What you would like to learn about cemeteries.

You will also list Where you might find the answers and information.

Day 1-4:  Student teams worked together to gain some basic information and started to build a strong knowledge base. They used a wiki to store and organize their information before publishing it to this website. They listed all of their citations for images and articles. You can see the wiki here. Before they began their research we discussed and practiced citations and note taking.

Students broke into pairs to study important aspects of the project including history, burial customs from other cultures, famous burial sites, headstone symbolism, horticulture, epitaphs, weathering, and preserving cemeteries..

Day 5: A representative from Garmin Industries will visit and show us how to use the GPSs. (Garmin guy stood us up twice!!) We had to leave it to the kids to figure out how to use the GPSs, which of course they did.

Day 6-7: Bree, Brian and Jake, students from Shawnee Mission North High School, came to the Center and taught us the fundamentals of digital cameras. Our students also learned the importance of file management and renaming the files. Students took dozens of photos, selected and printed their favorites.   Enjoy the slide show.

Day 8: Mrs. Moffitt's brother, Craig Campbell. a professional video producer, came to talk to the kids about digital video.  They learned about zoom (don't do it) pan, tilt, wide shot  (WS), medium shot (MS) and close up (CU) shots, sequencing, and establishing the scene.  He brought his big video camera and students got to try it out. Several students will be in charge of digital and video cameras in the field.

A young man, Ben Larsen, came from the Amos Funeral Home to talk to the students about gravestones and markers.  He brought a marble stone from 1879, several bronze markers, and samples of polished and unpolished granite.  The kids got to ask all kinds of questions about the funeral business.

We also had a chance to talk about the "Dark Side of Death" between speakers. Troy Taylor has written many book about cemeteries and ghost stories. We read excerpts from Beyond the Grave including The Mystery of Edgar Allan
Poe and the Haunted Catacombs and The Horror of the Grave. Kids always love ghost stories and were intrigued by the inventions to prevent premature burials. 

Day 9: Our first field trip was an introductory trip.  We went to the Shawnee Indian Mission and had a wonderful lecture and tour by Howard Ziegenhorn.  Howard is a neighbor of the Shawnee Mission Indian Mission and has been a docent there since his retirement.  He told us a lot of stories about the Mission and cemetery inhabitants.  You can read the historical information about the Mission and the cemetery here.  In the afternoon we went to the Fuller Family Cemetery in Gardner Kansas.  Bob Fuller, a descendant of the people buried in the cemetery, was nice enough to take the day off to be with us. It was fun to see Mr. Fuller and the kids laying next to the gravestones trying to decode the inscriptions. Read all about the  Fuller Family Cemetery and see the pictures!  We will be taking the PDAs, GPSs, digital cameras and digital video camera out into the field.

Day 10-11: Mrs. Moffitt spent two days teaching a unit on Weathering.  You can see her handouts in the Handouts section of this website. You can also see the Weathering Wiki that the students completed.  They each reported about their topic and students will use this information in the field.

 Students will update their KWWL chart with the new learning as well as verify or cross-out what was posted in the "Know" column. If something was logged there, but is proven to be wrong, it is crossed out and corrected with the new information.

Day 13: Our second fieldtrip was marred by bad weather.  It was cold 44º and really damp.  The forecast called for rain but we decided to chance it to see if we could get at least part of our data collected.  Phil Barbour, a local re-enactor, met us at the Antioch Pioneer Cemetery.  After a short visit he let us look in the chapel and we got busy collecting the information on the the grave markers.  We lasted through two rain showers and lunch on the bus.  We finally left around noon having collected the information on 600 grave markers.

Day 14:  We chose a beautiful day for our third and final fieldtrip.  The bus picked us up and took us a short distance to three cemeteries. Linda Lewis, our resident historian met us there and told us about St. Joseph Cemetery. There are local historical connections to many people buried in the St. Joseph Cemetery.  We spent several hours looking for the largest family groups and for the resting places of the people who had local streets and parks named after them.  The Rieckes and the Pflumms had the largest family groups with twenty nice each and we founds dozens of familiar street names.  We then moved to the Shawnee Cemetery.  After visiting the St. Joseph Cemetery we were surprised to find parts of the Shawnee Cemetery in disrepair.  We made some guesses as to why this was so. We again looked for the largest family group and included the oldest person and the oldest gravestone in our search.  We also located the graves of people who had served in The Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Korean War and the war in Vietnam.  On of our most exciting finds was the marker of a soldier who had fought in the War of 1812.  The marker was not original but we were thrilled to find it.

After lunch we took a quick look at the Pleasant View Cemetery.   We were surprised to find a marker in the shape of a Smurf!  We took some time to do some rubbings and hopped on the bus for our short trip back to school.

Day 16:  We were finally back at the Center after two back to back days in the field.  We spent the morning working with Mrs. Mullane learning how to work with data using Microsoft Excel.  In the afternoon we begin the laborious job of entering the data from the Antioch Pioneer Cemetery.  Having recorded 900 graves we knew we had our work cut out for us. The data was entered into a gigantic database on the Internet.  We will then transfer the information into Excel and design charts and graphs of our research.

Day 17:  We spent the morning reviewing our fieldtrips and looking at this website and photos we'd taken on our trips.  We then wrote a two page Reflection Essay and included some of our favorite photos.  Mrs. Bosch then converted our essays into pdf files and posted it to the website.

Day 18, 19 and 20: We spent time cleaning up some loose ends.  We learned how to do pivot tables in Microsoft Excel so we could analyze the data we collected in the field.  We updated some of the web pages replacing photos off the internet with photos we took in the field.  Some people worked on the videos, some did slideshows and Michelle did a Scrapblog.  Hopefully you will enjoy our website.