FIELD TRIPS
Our interactive, inquiry-based programs give students the opportunity to creatively explore topics, interact with primary sources, and sharpen their critical thinking skills as they delve into Windsor’s fascinating history. Each experience is specially designed to complement the 2024 Connecticut Social Studies standards while providing students and teachers with a memorable day of fun and discovery.
Have an idea for a field trip or in-class workshop? In addition to providing these programs we are willing to work with schools to alter existing programs or develop new programming that aligns with your specific field trip expectations.
Pricing: $5 per student. Teachers and chaperones are not required to pay to attend field trips. Our site requires a minimum of 1 adult for every 10 students.
Ask a Historian
Grades K-8 | Approximate Length: 45 minutes | Max Capacity: 1 class per presentation
In-Class or Virtual Program
Do your students want to know what a classroom looked like 100 years ago? Or which house is the oldest in town? Do they wonder how people made a living in the past? Perhaps they’re curious about old cars, trains, or boats? Or about the games that children played?
For this program, students will send in their questions about Windsor’s past and our team of professional historians will find the answers using photographs, letters, ledgers, oral histories, and other primary source documents from the Windsor Historical Society archives. These documents will be used to create a presentation that can be run either in the classroom or virtually.
Questions must be submitted two weeks prior to the presentation to give our team time to find the answers.
Cost: $75 per presentation. Additional presentations for the same school cost $50 each.
Annie’s Home
Grades 3-5 | Approximate Length: 2 hours
Come learn about life after the Revolutionary War through the eyes of nine-year-old Annie Howard. Through our authentically furnished, hands-on home, meet the Howard family, learn about economics in Grandpa Howard’s store, and send a letter through time with our early Windsor post office. In this two-hour program, students will discover what life was like for a child 200 years ago, learn about early American economics, try their hand with a quill pen, and have some old-fashioned fun.
Participating classes will be given a copy of our self-published Annie’s Home book to use in their classroom.
*Note: Due to the small size of the Strong-Howard House, this program is limited to a maximum of 36 students at a time. An additional workshop listed in the Life in Early Windsor program can be added to expand the capacity to 50 students and the program length to 3 hours.
Curious about Annie? Check out her book in our gift shop.
Early Life in Windsor
Grades 3-8 | Approximate Length: 3 hours | Max Capacity: 60 students
Students will learn about Windsor’s settlers and how daily life in Early Windsor differed from modern times, with a focus on the colonial and post-Revolutionary eras. This is a mix-and match program in which teachers can choose workshops from the Annie’s Home, Resistance and Freedom, and our retired Colonial Life in Windsor program.
Workshops include:
Annie’s Home
– Annie’s Home House Tour
– Captain Howard’s Store
– The Colonial Post Office
Colonial Life Program
– Windsor History Gallery Tour
– Exploration of Palisado Cemetery
– Architectural Tour of Meadow Road
Resistance and Freedom
– Primus Manumit and Colonial Medicine
– The Mitchell Brothers Primary Source Survey
– Nancy Toney and Connecticut Slavery
– Complicity: How Windsor Supported Slavery
Resistance and Freedom
Available January 2025
Grades 5 & 8 | Approximate Length: 3 hours | Max Capacity: 60 students
Join us as we follow in the footsteps of four of Windsor’s early Black residents: Primus Manumit, Windsor’s first Black doctor; Oliver and Moses Mitchell, freeborn brothers, community makers, and Revolutionaries; and Nancy Toney, who was among the last of those enslaved in the State of Connecticut.
In this new program, students will learn about the lives of these four individuals and discover how the town of Windsor supported and profited from the transatlantic slave trade. They will explore a colonial doctor’s office, investigate primary source documents, engage with firsthand accounts of the Revolutionary War from both Patriots and Loyalists, and deliberate on complex concepts of community, complicity, and courage.
Upon booking this program, teachers will receive pre-visit materials on the Gradual Emancipation Acts, the laws that ended slavery in Connecticut. We recommend that students be familiar with both the concepts of slavery and emancipation before participating in this program.