History You Can Hold: Notes on the Classroom Kit Idea
- Dan Barnfield
- Nov 1
- 3 min read
I've been playing with this idea in my head for a while, so let's put it on paper. The idea is to build classroom kits that use a single artifact, a WWI Victory Medal (or another medal), as the anchor point for an entire investigative learning experience.
I'm jotting this down partly to document my process and partly to explain what I'm trying to build.
Starting Point: A Medal You Can Touch
I want to create an experience that connects a student with the past. Time blurs connections, and physical connections are lost. I believe the right object can still make a connection.
A Victory Medal, or other WW1 medals, are perfect for this because they're personal. Every one of them is engraved around the rim with a name, rank, service number, and regiment. When a student holds one, they're not just handling "an artifact"; they're holding something a real person earned, carried, and maybe kept for the rest of their life.
In the classroom kits, students will pass the medal around, inspect it, trace the engraving with their fingers, and start with the simple question:
Who was this?
Everything else grows out of that.
Following the Trail: Archives, Files, and Diaries
With the information on the medal, I should be able to track down the soldier's personnel records through Library and
Archives Canada. I plan to pull:
attestation forms
medical files
service records
regimental war diaries
any additional notes tucked into their digitized file
From there, I plan to map out their wartime experience, where they trained, what unit they served with, when they sailed overseas, and what happened to them along the way.
Before and after the war, will take more digging. Using tools like Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com should help me find family connections, jobs, addresses, marriages, or even small stories buried in local papers. And when the record runs thin, I can still work from their occupation or birthplace to build a reasonable picture of the world they came from.
I'm not trying to write full biographies. My goal is to create enough context that a student can see this soldier as a human being, not a line in a roster.
Building the Kits Themselves
Once I have the research, I'll assemble each kit with copies of anything that helps tell the soldier's story:
attestation papers
medical sheets
service summaries
diary excerpts
newspaper articles
photographs
maps or training outlines
But I'm not giving students a neat, curated path to "the right answer." Real history isn't that polite. Some documents will be accurate. Some will be contextual background. And some will be false leads, misleading details, unrelated clippings, or fragments that point in the wrong direction.
Not to be sneaky. Just to mirror how actual historical research works. You sort. You sift. You follow threads that go nowhere. You learn to ask better questions. My plan is for students to practice that kind of thinking, not just memorize facts someone else already organized for them.
What Students Will Actually Do
The core task is simple:Connect the medal to the correct soldier.
Students will read, compare, cross-reference, and build their own understanding. They'll work out what's reliable, what's not, and what actually helps them piece the person together.
If it goes the way I hope, they won't just learn about the Great War; they'll learn how to handle evidence, deal with uncertainty, and build a story from scattered clues.
It's really a historical mystery game, but built from real lives and real documents.
Why I'm Making This
If I can build these kits the way I imagine them, students will come away not just knowing something about the past, but feeling they touched it and connected with someone from another time.
That's the plan, anyway. And now that I've written it down, it's time to get to work.
-Dan Barnfield
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