CHICKAMAUGA, Ga. — Walking into an elementary school gymnasium, one expects basketball goals, cafeteria tables, perhaps a small stage.
Dozens of celebrity appearances normally are out of the question, but Thursday morning, Amelia Earhart, Abraham Lincoln and Michael Jackson came to Cherokee Ridge Elementary School.
Spanning from first to fifth grades, 94 children from the school’s Kaleidoscope gifted student program dressed up as famous people to perform for the entire student body in a collective wax museum project.
“Getting to dress up and actually act like her and just being in it is very fun,” said 9-year-old Rebekah Pitts as she took a break from portraying Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. “You understand her more than you would writing it down from a book.”
While Jackie O may be considered American royalty, Chastity Hall went for the more-familiar kind.
“I like royalty, so I just wanted to pick Queen Elizabeth II,” said the 9-year-old. “I learned that her financial properties and holdings made her one of the world’s richest women.”
Gifted-student adviser Beverly Gamble brainstormed the project after testing some ideas to make history class more personal.
Students chose their characters and began research in November. Some even watched movies about their person’s life, according to Ms. Gamble.
But she said the in-school presentation gave students something more than biographical information.
“So many of them said, ‘I can’t do that; I just can’t do that,'” Ms. Gamble said. “And they’re in there now just performing their hearts out, so I think they’ve gained a lot of confidence from it.”
Dressed in a suit emblazoned with a presidential badge, Kameron Oliver, 7, prepared to tell his fellow first-graders all about his time as George W. Bush before explaining the “coolest parts” of the project’s final stage:
“Being president and getting in the newspaper!”
