Seventh- and eighth-grade students at Sacred Heart Academy will soon have the opportunity to experience history firsthand when the Gen. George S. Patton Desert Training Center Mobile Museum comes to the campus. The museum will be part of a full day of World War II-related education.
“This is a good, hands-on activity for them to help them better understand the entire World War II picture,” said Sacred Heart principal Bob Hamm, “especially the leadership involved in World War II.”
The museum is an 18-wheeler that houses an authentic collection of World War II memorabilia. This collection includes actual uniforms worn by Patton.
“There’s so much little written in the history books today,” said Col. Paul Kiner, chief of staff for a veterans group known as First Composite Group, which orchestrates the mobile exhibit. “That’s why we military veterans went and put this together.”
Kiner said the goal of the museum is to educate students about Patton’s role in World War II and about how he used his Desert Training Center in California and Arizona.
In addition to touring the mobile museum, students will learn from lesson plans that First Composite’s staff has developed and in-class lesson plans about World War II.
“That whole day the students will be having lessons on World War II involved in the museum itself, and the personnel who are with the museum will be doing a lot of the teaching throughout the day in the social studies classes,” Hamm said.
A unique aspect about the mobile museum is that at the beginning of the day each student will assume the identity of a person who had a significant role in World War II. This gives students a more personal look at one person from the war.
“They have to research it on the Internet to find out who that person was, and what they did,” Kiner said. “At the end of the tour they come back into the classroom and they find out the results of what happened to those individuals.”
The museum visits Sacred Heart on Wednesday, March 5. Sacred Heart will be the only stop the museum makes in San Diego County.
For more information, call (760) 954-4934, or visit firstcompositegroup.org.