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Museum Classes for Rostov Schoolchildren

During April 16–19, 2019, the museum workers of the youth programs department of the Museum-Reserve of M.A.Sholokhov held interactive museum classes and workshops for school students and kindergarten children in Rostov-on-Don.

The 7–8-year schoolchildren with great interest listened to the lecture “A Word about Books Piercing Ages” and learned how much Sholokhov’s books meant for the soldiers during the Great Patriotic War.

The 6-year school students learned about the features of upbringing a boy in a Cossack family, about Cossack traditions including “saddling the horse” and presents “for a tooth”.

Little Cossacks from an early age were taught to male labour: they herded geese, sheep, horses, and when they got older, they ruled the oxen during tillage and land harrowing. At the age of 17–18, young people began their main preparation for military service.

The 5-year students attended a museum class “Old School Education”. Travelling to the past, to the origin of the first education institutions in the Don country the schoolchildren learned what subjects were taught a hundred years ago, imagined themselves in the place of their great-great-grandparents: wrote letters with a wooden stick on the wax plate, learned to read in the Old Slavonic language, and with excitement saw yellowed commendable sheets of the best students of the early XX century. Also, the children saw whips, a punishment instrument in the old school.

At the workshops the children with great relish painted glasses and Easter eggs with stained paints, made clay models of a Cossack kuren (house) and Easter eggs in the “decoupage” technique, and made dolls of natural materials.

The kindergarten children visited a dramatized lesson “Egg is Good for Christ’s Day” and learned about traditions and customs of celebrating Easter in the Upper Don region.

The classes for young Rostovites were interesting and fruitful.

Svetlana Usova