History Colorado Center – Elizabeth Bello Aldaco, Week 3

 History Colorado Center 

Hey everyone, welcome back!

I want to start off by saying that I can not believe next week is my last week,  time has flown by super quickly!! Anyway, this week was filled with a lot of engaging learning experiences, and I actually remembered to take pictures!

To start off Tuesday, it was a calm work-online day for me, so I did not interact with visitors or the camp kiddos. I finished up researching pictures on the digital collection History Colorado Center has for the biographies of people who were influential in Colorado. This is all to prepare for Colorado's 150th anniversary exhibit.

On Wednesday I did a little bit of research on the borderlands of Southern Colorado. This research will be helpful for future activities the camp kids will be doing. My supervisor, April, and I then headed to the state capitol for a tour! This tour was to help us with our research that I mentioned in week 1. I got to learn more about the Capitol's "circle of fame," which are 16 stained glass window portraits honoring people who contributed to Colorado's history. After our tour, we went back to the museum to have an education team meeting; we went over our progress, accomplishments, and goals for the next week. 

<--(You can't really see, but this is the circle of fame!)

Thursday I was with camp most of the day. This week we focused on Colorado's Indigenous history! One of our hands-on activity was to make food that Native Americans ate, but we only had a short amount of time, so we had to improvise. I helped lead the kids through the activity; we made tortillas! I was the only person that had made tortillas before, so my amazing co-worker, Becca, trusted me to help her with the activity and teach her along the way!

Later that day, I had a behind-the-scenes tour on how the museum takes care of their collection and new items that arrive. This reminded me of the Preserving America's Treasure workshop we did! One thing that I remember from the workshop is that to preserve objects for a longer time, they have to be at a certain temperature with no light. I learned that we have a big Civil War collection of uniforms and weapons. But one thing that surprised me was how they have a lot of clothes on hangers; I think this is because the space is limited.

Finally, today I just continued my research on the borderlands of Southern Colorado and helped at camp. Since the kids were being really good this week, they got free time. My group chose to go to the 90's exhibit and to Keota. Keota was a town in CO, but now it is mainly abandoned; it played a huge part in our agriculture. The exhibit is a little playground that recreates the living experience of the people who lived in that town. In the 90's exhibit, I saw Morticia and Gomez's outfits from "The Addams Family," which might not be really related to all of this, but I really enjoy that movie!

That concludes my third week, see you next time!

- Elizabeth :)