Cultural Fashion and Mannequins

I’m a teacher in a small school with a lot of challenges. Like many new privet schools we struggle with funding and many other administrative concerns. But the truth of the matter is that these things are not maybe concern directly. I’m a teacher and as a teacher I am presented with the challenge of coming up with new, exiting, and creative ideas for my students. This challenge is something that I enjoy immensely and it is the purpose of this review to show how something as apparently unrelated to teaching like a mannequin became a major part of not only my history class but all the history classes in our whole school

I was thinking of a way to get the students more involved in history. History is a subject that has tremendous insight and perspective for adults but unless there is real direct and person to person action children’s minds are not naturally inclined to follow the story line. So I needed a way to make the subject of history relevant.

The idea came to me when I was having lunch with my brother in law. He sells mannequins and dress forms online and I thought; what if I had some display mannequins in my classroom and got the children to dress them up in the clothing that was worn by both modern and ancient peoples of the world.

I brought the idea up to my principal and he was ever enthusiastic. I started collecting as many old Halloween costumes from my friend that were relevant to my project. I got bucket loads! I brought two mannequins into the classroom and had the kids line up for the project. It was a tremendous success! They had so much fun! I would say “make ma a native Indian” and the children would rifle through the costume containers and grab all the things that a native Indian would were and dresses the display mannequin.

I succeeded in making at least that part of history fun and relevant to the children. The ideas that followed this project are still streaming across my mind. It is a very good thing to actually think outside the box and bring something that is apparently so irrelevant, like a mannequin come to life and bring history to life for children.