A pioneer school located in Harrisburg, Banner County, Nebraska

The country school experience orientation
and Opening  Exercises

Lesson time: 25 minutes

OBJECTIVES: 1.  Student will be oriented to Flowerfield School and be able to assume the roles, dress, and   appropriate behaviors of students of the late 1800’s.
2.  Students will participate in and understand the background of patriotic exercises.
3.  Students will relate school architecture to function, use of available materials, and community resources.

As pioneers and settlers moved westward, the one-room school played an important role in settling the plains.  From 1870 until 1940, Rural America was raised in a country school.  The values and traditions that made up our combined heritage were taught by teachers in isolated communities across the vast open land. 

A community with a school was a community with a future.  Unlike the East where the settlers built churches first, the first priority of the Western pioneer was erecting a community school.  Providing for the future of a community means organizing a school.

The students are encouraged to come to Flowerfield School dressed as they think a child of 1888 would have dressed.  The children’s interpretation’s of period dress is greatly varied.  Upon hearing the school bell being rung, the students line up in two lines, boys on the right and girls on the left according to size with the shortest in the front.  Here they hear the rules of the day and what is expected of them.  The main emphasis is “Silence is golden”.   A child must raise his or her hand in order to speak.

The students will proceed into the school building with girls sitting on the left half of the room and boys on the right half of the room in straight backed benches.  The pledge is recited together in the fashion of the time, with out stretched arms and with out the phrase “Under  God”.  They close opening exercises singing “America” while the teacher plays the antique pump organ.