BROWNSTOWN — Betty White, Adele, Mookie Betts, Chuck Norris and Janet Jackson recently made an appearance in Brownstown.
Simone Biles, Malala Yousafzai and Trea Turner were there, too.
So what brought these people to town? Well, the real people weren’t there. Brownstown Elementary School third-graders, however, did their best to bring them to life.
For the 15th year, Beth Shelton had students in her class pick any person they wanted to research, tie in several subjects and make a presentation for their wax museum project.
The social studies culminating activity has given her students a chance to choose a famous historical or present-day person to research. Then they read a book or an article about them and create a display board to include a biography, a hand-drawn portrait, a timeline, a word cloud, compare and contrast, an information sheet and a map.
The biography is written in third person, and they take some of the information and put it into a first-person speech for the day of the wax museum. That correlates with language arts standards.
That was presented May 11 on the softball field behind the school. That was the location for the third year in a row after being conducted inside the school in years prior.
As other students and teachers at the school and family members walked around to each character, they pushed a paper button on the display board to bring the character to life.
“All of these were self-chosen. These are all their ideas,” Shelton said.
While Sacagawea, Pocahontas, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart, Anne Frank, Daniel Boone and Helen Keller have been chosen several times over the years, some new ones come along each year, too.
Shelton encourages her students to pick a person related to their interests.
“I have Betty White, Dolly Parton, Desmond Doss,” she said of the new characters this year. “I have a boy that’s very interested in the Titanic, so he wanted to be the captain (Edward J. Smith). We read a book on Thomas Edison in our reading books.”
One girl likes painting, so she chose artist Frida Kahlo. Two boys play baseball, so they chose Major League Baseball players Betts and Turner.
“The painter up here (Kahlo), I had never heard of her, so that was new to me,” Shelton said. “You always have a few athletes, but I had less than that. Those boys love baseball, so that’s perfect for them.”
Each year, Shelton said she loves seeing her students embrace the fun project near the end of the school year.
“They had fun, and I think they learned a lot,” she said.