By Savannah Lore

I had the opportunity to help out with the Wornall-Majors children’s summer camp. I will be working for a full week long session and make more posts but I will talk about my experiences helping out with the last day of our second camp session. (We had four week long sessions, this was the last day of the third.)

It was interesting to work with children and teach them about history. I think that this group of kids was actually interested in the activities and history, which made interpreting information to them much easier. I think that working with children can both be easy and a challenge. When they are excited, they have great questions and are learning some things for the first time. So, they do not usually try to challenge what you say. I think the challenge comes into play when they are not engaged or don’t care.

We had two presenters today. The first was a confederate reenactor with a group called Elliott’s Scouts named Carl Listron. I think people assume a certain bias with people who reenact as a Confederate but Carl was very historically accurate and discussed the war how I think it should be, which is without bias and factual.

The second presenter was a Civil War medical reenactor who showed the kids period medical equipment and discussed what doctors did in the military during the war.

Here is his little bag of “goodies.”

The presenter talked about what doctors did not know (spreading disease through germs) and also what other skills a doctor would have. The picture shows he talking about how dentists (military did have dentist who had medical licenses to do other procedures)  removed teeth with certain tools.

I think the most important thing I learned today was about how kids respond to history and how to work with them in this setting. It was also a great experience to help lead a group of kids when a presentation was happening. I could help the kids direct their questions and help the presenter when things needed to be simplified or cleared up.