Frontier Experience Fourth-Graders Learning History Through Hands-On Skills, Crafts Of Pioneers, Native Americans

Coeur d’Alene schools

Don’t be surprised if your fourth-grader comes home from school one day and asks for some animal brains for a school project.

Oh, and some fresh hides, too.

Brain tanning, a traditional skill for preparing hides, is part of a program that introduces Coeur d’Alene School District fourth-graders to the skills and crafts of Idaho pioneers and Native Americans.

Steve Myer, associate director for Lutheran Ministries, manages the Frontier Experience program, a day of hands-on learning with frontier and native crafts.

Part of the outreach mission of the Lutheran congregations in the Northwest, the program is operated at Lutherhaven, a 60-acre retreat, and works in tandem with the school curriculum. The program helps satisfy the requirement for teaching fourth-graders Idaho’s history.

“The program gives kids a grasp on where things come from,” Myer said.

Frontier Experience is an eight-hour series of activities where students learn skills like blacksmithing, tanning, survival and domestic skills like cooking on a fire, carding wool and chinking log cabins. Later in the day, they hike up to a teepee village and experience Native American life. They learn games and how to braid hides. The students work with traditional tools and methods, using bucksaws and draw knives and shooting bows and arrows.

All of the activities are carried through by a staff in costume, many assuming identities of real characters from 1899. The program began 10 years ago with schools renting the facilities and running the demonstrations.

Gradually, the program took its present form as the Lutherhaven staff itself began developing activities and providing demonstrations.

Ron Fisher, 52, a fourth-grade teacher at Sorensen elementary, said, “it’s the culminating experience of Idaho history, both Native American and pioneering. It’s a neat way to actually see it.”

Fisher is a native of the Coeur d’Alene area and a teacher of 30 years. He is also the author of Beyond the Rockies, a history textbook used in local schools.

Fisher agrees with Myer that Frontier Experience offers students a chance to see where things come from.

“Our next unit takes us to Cataldo Mission,” he explained, “and after attending Frontier Experience, the kids can really see what those builders had to go through to get each board.

“It gives them the flavor of how difficult it was,” Fisher added.

Fisher noted that the bus ride home is nowhere near as noisy as the ride over.

Myer suggested that “kids don’t have the connection to their roots.”

Both Myer and Fisher pointed out that the fourth-graders are naturally interested in Idaho history. Fisher said that they are “really interested in their area.”

Myer said some of the 1,000 students who attend the program each year “know all the facts.”

Said Myer, “We ask them at the end of the day, `How many of you would have liked to live back then?”’ About a third say no.”