Arbor Day is Friday, April 28, 2023. We're opening the Walking Trail and Arboretum for first, second and third grade classes to come for a 40-minute outdoor STEAM adventure featuring trees. Your students will hear and read poems about trees. They will learn to identify the parts of a tree and count tree rings to figure out how old a tree was when it was cut down. The experience involves a half-mile walk on a gravel trail through a beautiful arboretum at 616 Clintonville Road in Paris, Kentucky. We are charging $2/person. Use this link to select when your group will come and to help us have enough tree cookies on hand. A spacious picnic area is available for your class to use if you want to bring brown-bag lunches. Some souvenirs: books, candy, and trading cards are for sale if your class brings spending money. Please use this link to register your class and to select the time you will come. 

Yesterday, February 6, 2023, was the Jewish festival Tu B'Shvat . It is the birthday of the trees. The date this festival is celebrated shifts from year to year. All Jewish feasts do because the Jewish calendar is lunar. The birthday of the trees it will always be in January or February, however. Why do the trees need a birthday? Because the ancient Jewish law forbade a person from eating from a fruit tree until it was five years old. So, all the trees have their birthdays on the same day.  What does that have to do with us at the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project in Paris, Kentucky? Our mission is to provide education around the Christian religion and its history, particularly in Kentucky. As one of the signs on our half-mile Walking Trail says, the first people who believed the Christian message were Jewish people living in Jerusalem in the first century of the Christian era. So, by honoring this Jewish festival, we recall the roots of the Christian faith. Bes

Religion is lumped in with history, literature, languages and art as one of the humanities but we tend not to feel as comfortable teaching about religion as the other subjects. Teaching about religion does not promote any one particular faith. It introduces the fact that there are differences between people and their ideas and practices about God. Primary students can easily be introduced to the idea that there are different religions during social studies units about the community and its people. Different religions use different types of  buildings. Different religions can be identified by the way some adherents dress. When you are teaching about communities, say that people worship in different types of buildings. People who are Christians worship in churches or cathedrals. People who are Jewish worship in synagogues. People who are Muslim worship in mosques, and people who are Hindu or Buddhist worship in temples. Take pictures of any of these buildings in your school community and

     Living History is a term for an interpretive strategy used at museums like Colonial Williamsburg  or Conner Prairie . It is when visitors are ushered back to a specific place in the past that is peopled by costumed interpreters doing everyday tasks using authentic tools and materials or else very accurate reproduction artifacts. Often the visitors are encouraged to assist with the activities. Sometimes the interpreters have adopted a persona based on a real person. This approach uses theater methods and requires each character to have a very detailed understanding of the time and circumstances their person would have lived in. It takes research to locate the documents, oral history resources, and evidence from material culture from which each character is created. Then it takes a certain discipline to maintain the character's first-person perspective when visitors interact from their modern point of view. This introduces a fun tension that emphasizes the shifts in how we live

 Dear Teacher, It's nearly winter break. We here at the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project wish every Kentucky teacher a blessed holiday season. We want you to know that we value what you do and that we understand that your job is not about the paycheck. It's truly about the students. It takes commitment and sacrifice. We want to take this opportunity to thank you.  You more than deserve the recognition and the honor. Many of you keep a warm coat in the trunk of your car for when you have bus duty at the end of the day and the temperature has dropped 20 degrees since you left your house before it was light. You probably have spent several recent evenings preparing to delight your students with a holiday surprise before winter break. You routinely spend your own money to make sure your classroom has enough paper, pencils, crayons and other essential supplies so that every student can learn. Many have made it a personal mission to provide a safe environment for

There are four additional titles in the FKCC series of high-interest, low-ability chapter books: Great Idea: the Story of Harry Clark Karsner; Knocked Down: The Story of Carl Brashear; Too Bad: The Story of Peggy Taylor; and Not Fair: The Story of Mary Britton. The four original titles have new covers as well. You can find all eight books on Amazon here . The books are appropriate for the public school classroom library. They model the Kentucky State Curriculum Standards for Social Studies Inquiry Process They introduce famous Kentuckians  They reflect typical classroom problems: bullying, being a new kid, having a disability... They include an archival image from the Library of Congress Collection They have a glossary and a works cited page They are written at the 2nd to 4th grade reading level with as many words as possible limited to a single syllable They have four short chapters They are fictional accounts of a team of fourth grade students who must collaborate to create an exhibi