On Wednesday, May 15, the fourth graders at Meadowlark Elementary School (MES) will be touring the Phillips County Museum, the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum, and the Robinson House in Malta. According to Ms. Shandel Fouts, one of the two fourth grade teachers at MES, these locations will not only fulfill criteria for place-based education but will be relevant and interesting to the students.

Throughout the museum, students will see artifacts that interpret how pioneers, cowboys, and Native Americans lived, worked, and played. The tools, toys, instruments, clothing, furniture, and historic photographs on display all provide an interpretation of early life on the plains. Of special interest is the upstairs, which is divided into replicas of a cowboy bunkhouse, one-room schoolhouse, church, and mercantile.

Another series of exhibits feature the area’s criminal celebrity, Kid Curry, who began his outlaw career in Malta in 1894 when he shot Pike Landusky. In the following years, Kid Curry committed several more crimes in Phillips County, including a train robbery west of Malta in 1901. Authentic artifacts—such as photographs, newspaper clippings, wanted posters, and pistols—highlight the story of this gunman and his gang, “The Wild Bunch.”

Since Fouts’ grandmother grew up in Malta, the museum—with its homesteading history—holds a special place for her. “The Phillips County Museum is really cool because it has a lot of local history. I usually have the kids try to find pieces in the museum that have my family’s name on them. They get really excited when they find them!” Fouts said.

The Dinosaur Museum will take students even further back in time--seventy seven million years ago—when the area that would become Phillips County was a shoreline along the edges of a massive inland ocean. Because of this unique geological history, the area is a rich deposit of fossils of every kind. Here, students will meet Elvis, a 33 foot Brachylophosaurus that is approximately 95% complete, and Leonardo, a duckbill dinosaur so well-preserved that fossilized skin covers most of its body. Students will also engage in other activities, like identifying “Dino Skulls,” stepping into a T-Rex footprint, playing a Dinosaur Button Matching game, and constructing a dinosaur puzzle.

“The dinosaur museum is also really cool because it displays dinosaur fossils that were found around the Whitewater area, and the kids get really into that discovery idea. They like learning about something that was found so close to us,” Fouts stated.

Finally, the restored 1903 H.G. Robinson House and Gardens will enable students to take another trip back in time. Shipped out on the railroad and built on the frontier prairie, the historic Robinson home is a turn-of-the-century mail-order home that represents early architecture in the area. The house is situated with the front porches facing south so that the Great Northern Railway lines, the railroad depot, and “Siding 54,” which would later be known as the town of Malta, were all visible.

After the student groups finish their museum tours, they will have a picnic and then go swimming at the Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs near Saco.

“This trip is a fun way to end the year and to reward the kids for all of their hard work throughout the year,” Fouts concluded.