Miss Rumphius
“You must do something to make the world more beautiful.” -Miss Rumphius, the Lupine Lady
Presented By Girls Making History
For Girls in Grades 1 – 3
$30 for Members | $35 for Nonmembers
Advanced Registration Required
In conjunction with Wenham Museum’s current Ox-Cart Man exhibit, Barbara Cooney’s picture book Miss Rumphius will serve as the framework for a workshop exploring what it would have been like to be a girl living in rural New England around 1900.
Wearing period dress, a museum educator will read the picture book and then interpret the period of Alice Rumphius’ life through activities, such as:
- Use a period Sears catalogue and magazines to compare daily life, then and now. We will consider kinds of dreams girls had then and ask girls about their dreams for the future.
- Decoupage an old-fashioned cigar box with Victorian scrap for holding treasures and dreams.
- Bake gingerbread from scratch.
- Discuss what travel was like around 1900 and compare it with today. Invite ideas about places girls would like to visit and why. Put sand in canning jar and decorate it with shell designs for a future trip to the beach.
- Play period games, including hoop-and-stick, game of graces and hide the thimble. Compare games and play, then and now.
- Create thumbprint lupines on a card including the storybook quote, “I will make the world a more beautiful place by…”
- Each girl will also receive a packet of lupine seeds.
The program is presented by Girls Making History, an organization that creatively teaches United States history using biography, story, and hands-on projects to explore what girlhood would have been like during a specific era of American history.