OTISFIELD — Fifth-graders at Otisfiefld Elementary School recently produced a historical reenactment to teach other students about surviving at Valley Forge during the American Revolutionary War.

The pupils tackled an interactive social studies unit combining several types of learning that they then incorporated into the lesson.

“This was an integrated curriculum integrating literacy (reading and writing) with a content area of social studies,” teacher Pamela Marshall told the Advertiser Democrat a few days following the reenactment. “It also involved an outdoor learning component. The district’s (outdoor learning) coordinator, Sarah Timm, paid us a visit to help map out the best location to set up our Valley Forge encampment.”

The students based their project on what they experienced during a reenactment presented by one of Marshall’s classes on the Boston Tea Party.

Marshall is using the unit as a topic for coursework she is pursuing at the University of Southern Maine School of Education and Human Development. Her focus is to examine how reenactments affect learning.

“The lesson plan combines traditional curriculum of nonfiction reading and research writing within the social studies unit and outdoor learning,” Marshall said. “Students learn independently, researching and reporting on [the Revolution]. The kids each tackled their own topics and the work they completed was used to teach the others in the class.”

Marshall’s first class reenactment came about during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Boston Tea Party Museum was closed to the public and her students’ scheduled field trip had to be cancelled.

“Since we can’t go to museum? Bring it to us,” Marshall said. “The class learned about the Boston Tea Party, and I turned it over to them, asking, ‘How do we create a reenactment of it?’”

“The Boston Tea Party Museum is a living history,” she said. “The employees are all in character. The kids become part of the meetinghouse setting, they dump tea off the ship. Since we couldn’t go to the museum, they planned out their own [story] and presented it to the school. They had a ball. That started my inquiry about how do historical reenactment impact learning.”

Marshall’s current class remembered watching the Tea Party reenactment and it had stuck with them. So she assigned the same type of project to them, this time focusing on the period of 1777-78 and Valley Forge.

Ronan Bielby, Victoria Field, Noah Fortier, Jack Gregoire, Mia Harps, Matthew Morey, Emma Neuts, Emilia Ring, Darian Talley, Jerzey True, Logan Ventresca and Meadow Waitley all collaborated on the project.

They held a brainstorming class to consider which characters and tools they would need to accurately bring to life an event that occurred 245 years ago.

They scouted the land surrounding the school, like scouts would have done in 1777, to determine the best place to establish their camp.

“We needed props, like fire,” said student Emma Neuts. “We needed a firepit where someone would cook.”

The students also chose what types of characters they would need, deciding that they would mostly create soldier, officer, politician and doctor roles based on everyday people. The one exception was to include Gen. George Washington, the leader in charge of Valley Forge.

Each character was assigned a name by the class. Marshall assigned each student a character to play using a ranked-choice lottery method.

They planned out how the characters would interact during the reenactment.

“Two classrooms were invited to come out to the encampment site in the woods. They were from the towns of First Grade and Second Grade,” Marshall said. “We shifted into character and stayed there through the whole presentation.

“Gen. Washington gave them all an orientation about where they were, the year and status of the army and how they got to Valley Forge,” she said. “The students were asked to think about whether they had the choice to stay and fight, or would they leave when their enlistment was up, and they could go home to their families. That question was part of a (document-based question) program.

“We had to decide what colony the characters came from,” said student Ronan Bielby. “Their ranks, what they ate, what they did in civilian life. And whether they stay or go.”

It was up to the students to form their own opinions on whether to stick it out with Gen. Washington or not. There were compelling reasons to desert.

“The food was really gross,” declared student Jerzey True. “It tasted bad and really plain. At first it wasn’t bad, but you just got really sick of it.”

“And it was cold,” said student Noah Fortier. “You had to have fires in the cabins so you didn’t freeze. But there were no windows and (the cabins) filled with smoke.”

Neuts explained the hardship that came with worn-out clothes and no boots. “They had to walk around without shoes and a lot got frostbite. And they were starving, too.”

The role of Gen. Washington was played by Logan Ventresca. It was up to him to explain to the audience how hard it was to live at Valley Forge, and how difficult it was for Washington to lead the army.

“He had to encourage his troops and officers,” Ventresca said. “There would be more supplies on the way. [If] they could wait out the winter it would be fine once France joined the war. And then Gen. von Steuben came [from Germany] to help train the soldiers.”

The final part of the reenactment lesson was to include the younger audience’s perspective. Marshall interviewed the classes about what they learned and think of living history.

“The feedback is pretty interesting and extraordinary,” she said. “At each performance Gen. Washington oriented them and let them go to explore the encampment. Then we brought them back and asked, ‘So, now that you’ve seen the reenactment, would you stay or would you go?’

“So the younger grades got to form their opinions, and we were able to teach them about Valley Forge and that big question.”

Marshall added that as her class gave more performances, they began to evolve their characters and how they approached what might have really happened at Valley Forge.

“Between performances they tweaked their characters, working as a team on what they would say to each other. After we talked to the audience about what would happen if people deserted, one student decided they wanted to add trying to desert to their character.

“I loved that they took information we read about in primary and secondary documents and organically took on their own [interpretation],” Marshall said. “That was something they did not see coming, how their interactions could be used to teach others.”

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