For the week of  Sept. 26 - Oct. 2, 2001

Fourth-graders 
learn by doing

Pioneer chores teach Idaho history

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By PETER BOLTZ
Express Staff Writer

Ernest Hemingway Elementary School fourth-graders were given an education in pioneer living Thursday with the help of Cal and Marla Clevenger and their Wagons Ho experience.

Maggie Flood, 9, in Leslie Fundy’s fourth-grade class at Ernest Hemingway Elementary School, learns how to deal with knots when splitting wood.

This year was the ninth that the Clevenger’s came to the Ketchum school to teach by doing.

Fourth-grade Hemingway teacher Susan Thoreson said it was a way for her pupils to study Idaho history by reenacting pioneer chores.

A total of 110 children participated, which included 21 children brought up from Carey by fourth-grade teacher Diane Parke.

Parke said she had been bringing her pupils up for the last five years and called Wagons Ho "such a valuable program."

The Clevengers set up 12 stations at the corner of Second Avenue and Eighth Street, where pupils in groups of six to eight rotated through chores like sawing wood, branding, washing clothes, making fire with flint and steel, making butter and preparing food.

Colter Brehmer (left), 10, and Chase Balmer, 9, discover the teamwork necessary to work a two-man saw. Brehmer is in Leslie Fundy’s class, and Balmer is in Susan Thoreson’s class.

Periodically, Cal Clevenger would break from instructing pupils in the art of branding to walk over to the chuck wagon and pull his six-shooter from its holster and fire a blank into the air.

This is how everyone knew it was time to move on to the next station to learn by doing.

Clevenger used cardboard squares instead of calves, but the fire and the branding irons were real.

The fire served to heat up the branding irons, and to cook up a Dutch oven meal of beef stew topped with a crust of golden sourdough biscuits.

Wagon Master Cal Clevenger shows fourth-grade students from Hemingway and Carey elementary schools the beef stew they all helped to cook in a Dutch oven. When Clevenger opened the lid, a collective "Yum" arose from the children.

When lunch time rolled around, Clevenger lifted the lid of one of the ovens, and with that, the children who had surrounded the campfire let out a collective "Yum."

Jill Palmer, the fourth-grade teacher who has been the chief organizer of the project for Hemingway Elementary couldn’t be present this year.

But, here’s a message to her from all the fourth-graders who were at Wagons Ho …

"Yee haw!"

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