Going Back To School...

   
This past Saturday was the St. Petersburg Museum of History's Back To School event. We invited history teachers from around the county to show them the great exhibits, archives, and initiatives that can be used for and in their classrooms.

I had a ton of fun working on this event, and coming up with some cute school-themed tablescapes and details. Lets have a look:

Here is the Flight Gallery, in which we have a model of Tony Jannus's plane the Benoist, is where we hosted the event. Forgive the standard chairs, we were going for a casual look! 

For the tablescapes, we used the caterer's black linens as the base, and I purchased the brown paper in a giant roll at Lowes for $10. I made bowls out of black yarn and glue.  We filled them with real red apples, tied on some red gingham ribbons, and then used the red chiffon squares from my wedding underneath. My event chair added her own creative touch with the foam alphabet letters she bought at Michaels. The chalkboards I purchased at Joanns for $1.50 each and we reused some small vases I had at home (originally from the dollar store) to hold the crayons that guests could use to draw on the tables.

Here is a closer look at the apples and baskets I made:

And just to get guests thinking and drawing, we added a few little drawings of our own to the tables. I love how the white crayon looks on the brown paper!

The Museum is always in need of research materials for the Archivists, as well as volunteers. I used some more of the chalkboards to let guests know how they can help!

We created pledge cards, on which guests could pledge an item or a dollar figure towards an item. I found a photo of a yellow index card online, and used it for the background of my pledge cards. I popped it into a quarter page postcard layout on Microsoft Publisher, and used the Typewriterhand font to create the cards. I think they turned out so cute!

The guests can then drop them into boxes that we had at a few locations around the museum. I took a USPS box and covered it with red gingham fabric from Joanns. I then glued a school themed name plaque to the front of each one to let people know they can use them for donations and pledge cards.

We presented our Museum In A Box project, which allows teachers in 4th and 5th grades to borrow a box of artifacts, interactive media, lesson plans, and more from the museum to teach in their classrooms. The areas of history are Native Americas, Transportation, and Sports & Recreation.

Our Native American Museum in a Box was presented by the very lively expert Hermann Trappman. Our guests raved about him!

Our Transportation Museum in a Box was presented by Jeff Danner, a local transportation expert and City Council Member.

 

And our last Museum In A Box was presented by Dennis Schrader, who has an obsession for baseball history, and owns the largest collection of signed baseballs on the planet. Luckily for us, an article in the newspaper about him came out that morning, and he brought the case of signed balls featured in the article!

The evening was not complete without the delicious food from Delectables,
and our guests seemed to like eating on styrofoam lunch trays we provided to go with our school theme.

And last but not least, the AMAZING performance from the Nate Najar Trio.

Overall, I think it turned out to be a great event! Stay tuned to see what I do with all the apples we used at the tables.... apple recipes coming up!