Today was my last full day at Mount Vernon and I was determined to get the most out of it. I woke up early in the morning and made my way to the estate to watch the sunrise on the piazza. I’ve seen the sunrise hundreds of times in my life, but there’s something special when you realize that the first president of our country no doubt saw that same view at some point of his life. After admiring the view, I headed back to our living area for George Washington’s favorite breakfast…homemade hoecakes.
We started off our morning spending all the money we could in the gift shop of Mount Vernon before it opened to the public. There’s nothing quite like running around an empty gift shop to work your pocketbook into a frenzy.
Today was more or less a wrap up day where we were introduced to all the online media available to us on the Mount Vernon website. We were also turned loose to plan assignments and activities using all the resources at our disposal. It was great to finally have some time to plan on how I’m going to use the overwhelming amount of data that I acquired over my few days.
We then had a couple of lectures and round tables with various people about how to handle some of our most challenging TEKS using primary sources. I loved this part because I’m always looking for ways to up my game on these particular TEKS. At dinner, we spent some time thinking about how we would take what we’ve learned back to our communities. I might have even gotten talked into presenting at a conference next year!