The Heritage Alliance will host its first Virtual Fieldtrip Day on Monday, May 18. Throughout the day, the Alliance will offer tours and activities online for students learning from home. The day will include a look at their one room schoolhouse Oak Hill School, an interactive tour of Main Street Jonesborough, a tour of the third-floor bedroom of the Chester Inn Museum, an interactive artifact exploration, and much more. The Heritage Alliance will be streaming and posting content for students from 10:00 a.m. that morning to 2:00 p.m. that afternoon.
“Normally we welcome students in person to our historic sites, but it’s not safe right now to have a large group exploring together, so we wanted to offer an alternative for students who are learning from home,” Executive Director Anne Mason explains. “We also wanted to offer this experience to students who were supposed to come with their schools this spring and weren’t able to. This is a way for students, parents, and educators to engage with local history. Hopefully this will encourage them to visit the physical sites in the future when it’s safer to do so.” The tours and activities on May 18 will be streamed from and posted to the Heritage Alliance’s Facebook page, as well as the Chester Inn State Historic Site and Museum’s Facebook page. In the coming week, the Heritage Alliance will post a packet to their website that outlines what students and educators can expect to see and do on May 18.
“We’ve been posting a lot of educational activities to our website, including explorations of historic photos from our collection, and a primary source activity with the cholera epidemic of 1873. Our Virtual Field Trip Day is a new, educational activity for us, and we’re really excited to share the historic buildings with the students,” Mason adds. “We encourage students to log on with their families and ask questions. We want this to be as interactive as possible.”
The day will also include visits to the Christopher Taylor House, the Chuckey Depot Museum, and the Old Jonesborough Cemetery, with some surprises thrown in. To help cover expenses, the Heritage Alliance suggests a donation of $5.00-$7.00, which covers the normal fee for a student during a fieldtrip. Donations can be made online at www.heritageall.org.
