Franklin papers have electric effect
By DIANE GASPER-O'BRIEN
Teachers often make good students.
One of those is Janell Beilman, fifth-grade teacher at Wilson Elementary School in Hays.
Despite hearing similar presentations at the "Ben Franklin Papers" event at Fort Hays State University the past three years, Beilman said she never tires of taking students there.
On Monday, she was rewarded for that enthusiasm.
The fourth year of the event featured different activities than before, and Beilman thinks she might have learned as much as her students.
Some of those lessons for Beilman came from other students.
Fourteen students in Sue Boldra's social studies methods class in the Department of Teacher Education at Fort Hays State University come up with lesson plans and plan their interactive projects about Ben Franklin and his inventions.
"It's interesting to watch them and see what they came up with, how they interact with kids," Beilman said of the college students.
"You can tell some of them are naturals."
It's a learning experience for the Fort Hays students as well.
"I learned a lot more about (Franklin's) inventions than I ever knew before," said senior elementary education major Tiffany Hipp from Dodge City, who teamed up with senior Mindi Richmeier for a station that centered on bifocal glasses, one of Franklin's many inventions.
There also was stamp-making, instructions on how to chart the Gulf Stream and several quiz-bowl type units making learning fun by competition.
There also was a station where students had to create an invention using batteries, magnets and copper wire.
"A good cooperative learning structure," Boldra said.
In the past, eighth-graders also attended the day's events.
However, it would have been a duplication for this year's eighth-graders, who attended as fifth-graders in 2006.
So this year's group numbered about 300 Ellis County fifth-graders rather than nearly 600, cutting those 40-student classes of the past in half.
"Keeping the groups smaller was important; they remain more engaged that way," said Dawne Leiker, project coordinator for the Ben Franklin Papers. "Groups of 20 is really helping make it easier to interact with the kids."
Beilman said attending the event "sure makes teaching that (social studies) lesson a whole lot easier.
"They remember all his inventions," she added.
In addition to some new twists this year, there also was the familiar.
Fred Krebs, a history professor at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, impersonated Ben Franklin once again.
Daughters of the American Revolution members were serving drinks and cookies at a Boston Tea Party station.
And there were the two actual handwritten Ben Franklin letters and copies of Franklin's newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, which all remain on permanent display in Forsyth Library on the FHSU campus.
Beilman said the hands-on lesson kick starts the students' memories whenever they talk about Franklin or the Constitution for the rest of the year.
"When we go through some of that, it adds up for them," Beilman said. "It makes the writing of the Constitution (lessons) so interesting."
Ditto for getting to see some of Franklin's original letters, appraised at $25,000 and $35,000, respectively.
"We talk about it in the classroom, and they know what to expect," Beilman said of the letters.
"But even though I told them a dozen times, they ask, 'Are these real?' I tell them they were really handled by Benjamin Franklin."