Visiting Frank Lloyd Sites in Wisconsin and others activities with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
I
learned to look through the Madison (Wisconsin) newspapers everyday for fun
things to do with children in the community.
Many of these activities were free or very inexpensive.
We
went to many of these places on a regular basis, including:
Wisconsin
Historical Museum
Frank
Lloyd Wright Tour
Kids
in the Crossroads Performing Arts Programs
Wisconsin Historical
Museum
I
took Florence to see the Native American exhibit at the Wisconsin Historical
Museum, because the Shirley Temple movies she watched had negative stereotypes
of Native Americans in them.
The
displays have changed in the past twenty years, but I liked the putty figurines
that depicted Native American life in Wisconsin by the Wisconsin River.
Florence
wanted to play with the figurines. I
wished they sold play sets of the exhibits at the Museum’s gift shop.
Native
American tribes differ culturally and linguistically from one another. In Wisconsin, trading posts were the vehicle
of exchange for goods between the French fur traders, who bought pelts for the
fashion industry, and the Native Americans, who often bought cognac and dry
goods.
The
Museum’s website states that fishing, gardening, harvesting wild rice, and
maple sugaring were some of the ways to make a living for the Ho-Chunk Nation.
The
Ho-Chunk Nation according to their website occupied lands in Wisconsin, Iowa,
Illinois, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota. They are known as “people of the sacred
language.”
Describing
indigenous people and their culture is a different task, because genocide
almost wiped the tribes out.
The
tribes hid much information about their culture. A good book to read about hiding culture, but
still transmitting it to youth is entitled I, Rigoberta Menchu. It is the autobiography of the Nobel Prize winner
of the same name that was recorded by a French anthropologist.
The
trip to the museum was not a cure for the negative stereotyping I saw in the
Shirley Temple films, but you need to talk with children about stereotyping
over and over to help them deal with people on an individual basis not as a
race or ethnicity.
Doing the Architect
Frank Lloyd Wright Tour
Frank
Lloyd Wright is from Wisconsin, and I wanted Florence to know about him even
though she was very young. The expensive
tour of Talisen would not have been appropriate for her age (6).
However,
the Taliesen House has a good gift shop with a short documentary about
Wright. Florence wanted to play, but I
did manage to show her some pretty houses on the documentary shown in the gift
shop.
When
we drove up to the house, she said, “That’s the same house that was on TV!” I told Florence that the man who built the
house had aunts who ran an art school.
(My great aunts, who had teaching degrees from UW-Whitewater, babysat
those aunts and other Wright and Jones children during summer vacations at our
family’s farm.)
We
stopped by the Wright houses around Spring Green that are private homes and the
bank and golf course (not Wright but fun) that look like a spaceship from the
Jetsons cartoon series.
Kids in the Crossroads
Groups
that came to perform at the Civic Center in Madison put on free shows in the
lobby of the auditorium for children and their parents. I took Florence to all of them, but had to
work one weekend and dad had to do babysitting duty.
I
told Laurent that the Ballet Folklorico of Mexico was coming to Madison and
asked him to take Florence to the show.
When
I came from work, both my husband and Florence were talking to me at once about
the “Mexican Ballet.” My husband said
that they had beautiful costumes, did a war dance, and did a dance where one of
the performers put her hands in a flame.
Florence
said the dancers threw a streamer into the audience. She caught one of them, which she showed me
as she danced around the living room tossing it and re-rolling it.
My
husband worked long hours and on weekends.
I was glad he got to do some fun activities and outings with “kiddo,”
too.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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