HMS hosts ‘Living Wax Museum’

By KYLIE PORTZ

Last week, the Humboldt sixth-grade language arts classes held a “Living Wax Museum” on Greek Mythology at the Wildcat Athletic Complex for family and community members.

As part of the museum, students selected a Greek god, goddess, or mythical creature to research and present to the museum's “patrons” in character.

For the project, students dressed up as their subject, some students bringing props that symbolize aspects of their myth, and shared facts about them with the guests.

The event was organized by 6th Grade Language Arts Teacher Jennifer Ulrich, 6th Grade English and Language Arts teacher Theo Vardaxis and Instructional Coach Andrea Laubenthal.

Ulrich said, “We have them do like a book report or something every quarter to go with the books they’ve read. But at the end of this quarter, we wanted to try something new. I’ve seen wax museums in the past, so I talked to Andrea (Laubenthal), and she was willing to help.”

“We thought the Greek unit would be a good unit to do it on. It was the end of the year, so they’re kind of over the curriculum, and this was a fun way to teach the curriculum, so they stayed engaged. They appeared to really enjoy it. Their posters were amazing, I was very proud of them, they did an amazing job presenting. We had a nice turnout.”

Mr. Vardaxis has a personal connection to the Greek unit as he comes from a Greek family “My dad is from a small island called Lesvos. I don’t even know how many people live there. It’s a very small place. And my mom is actually from Cyprus, which is its own country, but it has a lot of heavy population of Greek Background.” He said.

For those curious, Lesvos (also known as Lesbos or Mitilini) is a Greek island off the coast of Turkey and as of 2021 had a population of 83,755.

He said, “For me personally, I am Greek, my parents grew up there, and I was raised around the culture. So when I found out when I was first hired here that the last unit we do is Greek Mythology, I was really excited about it.”

“We did an idea last year where they made posters and stuff to talk about a god or goddess, and then that kind of grew into the wax museum that we did this year.”

According to Vardaxis and Ulrich, the students began working on the project after Easter and put a lot of effort into their posters and getting to learn about Greek Mythology.

“It was just an easy way for them to learn about mythology, and they actually were able to learn more because there are more gods and goddesses and monsters covered by doing it the way we did, versus doing it through our curriculum. So that was nice.” Ulrich said.

Vardaxis said, “People don’t realize there’s literally like over 1000 Greek gods. So many little specific things. Kids picked characters I didn’t even really know about.”

For their presentation, the students had to memorize the information about their chosen character, something that, according to Vardaxis and Ulrich, was intimidating to them at first.

Ulrich said, “When we first told them, it was like a deer in headlights, and then we just had them keep practicing with each other, and then before I knew it they would rattle them off. Even going through Wednesday, when I went through, I was shocked at how many had them memorized.”

Read the full story in this week's issue of the Humboldt Independent!