La Paloma students learn by living history

History lessons in third grade are supposed to include local history and for Fallbrook’s third graders that means a trip to the De Luz Ecology Center which is also known as the De Luz Schoolhouse. On Dec. 8, a class of 29 third graders from La Paloma Elementary School traveled by bus to De Luz with their teacher Christa Rhine.

Rhine said, “They enjoy being out here.” She added that the children, who have heard about the place from older siblings and schoolmates, had been counting down the days to their fieldtrip, repeatedly asking “When do we get to go?”

To put the day’s lessons in perspective, center teacher aka schoolmaster Scott Gordon started out his one room schoolhouse program by showing the assembled students photos of his son, himself as a child, his father, and his grandfather to help take them back in time to 1911 when the children in the area attended a one room school like this one. The original schoolhouse, a short distance away, was used from 1888 until 1927, when the new one was finished.

For young children, history is usually a book of stories about a long ago time and/or a far away place. In the field trip to De Luz, local third graders “can experience the past. gives them a better perspective of their town,” said Gordon. “Their world is small; it is easier for them to understand history when it’s their town.”

To make history come alive, Gordon took the students through a typical school day in 1911 in a classroom with blackboards and a wood burning stove. Unlike today’s schools, this one had no principal, no janitor, and no nurse, just one teacher for first through eighth grades.

Back then, older students helped teach the younger children as well as cutting firewood and keeping the schoolhouse clean. The families bought the McGuffey Readers which each student used for a whole year then passed down to a younger sibling. The readers contained lessons in every subject except math.

The La Paloma students learned that each student in 1911 carried his or her lunch (often times a potato to bake on the stove) in a lard bucket along with a quill from a goose for a pen, ink to write with, a piece of chalk, an old sock to erase the chalk and the McGuffey Reader.

They also learned that the first settlers came to Fallbrook in 1869, homesteading in the Live Oak Park area where there was water. After five years of farming, each family was given 160 acres, which was why there were not a lot of people living in any one area back then. A one room school was all they needed.

While experiencing the school lessons of one hundred years ago, the La Paloma students also practiced their arithmetic skills and cursive writing on individual slate boards. They read from the McGuffey Readers and learned classroom rules, comparing them with their own class rules of today.

Besides academic subjects, they learned how household tasks were done in the old days. Instead of using a churn, they shook jarfuls of cream to make butter (which they ate on cornbread muffins). They also washed clothes with an agitator and washboard, filled buckets with a water pump, helped make ice cream using the hand-cranked method and made rope with a two piece contraption made especially for Gordon’s schoolhouse program.

The third graders were given new old-fashioned names like Vern, Percy, Lester, Mabel, Gertrude, and Opal for the day. One of the other activities on their list of tasks was writing a postcard at the De Luz post office. First built in 1914, and closed in 1955, it was once the smallest post office in the world.

Unlike the teachers of long ago who didn’t stay at one school for very long, Gordon has been teaching there for 18 years. He presents his one room schoolhouse program (which is done in conjunction with a Native American program the following day) September through December every year. Despite the many years of doing the same activities, Gordon said he is not tired of doing it, “Each group of kids is different.”

The field trip is a nice change of pace for the teacher as well as her students. Rhine said the kids who cannot handle themselves in the classroom do well at the schoolhouse. “It’s amazing; discipline wise, it’s not a problem <and> they remember the smallest details.” Every June she asks her students what there favorite part of the year was and “it’s always [going to] De Luz; it is so fun.”

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