Natasha Luepke

I’m leading a new project at work and thought, why not share what I’ve been up to?

Almost a year ago, I took the Museum Education and Outreach class from the American Association for State and Local History. It was fantastic, and provided solid ideas and examples of educational outreach. I work at an arts nonprofit that does a lot of things, including offering classes, but we’re looking for more opportunities to do outreach.

Traveling trunks, educational footlockers, field trip in a box: a large container with lesson plans and all the materials a teacher needs to implement it in the classroom to supplement their lessons.

I applied for, and received (!!!!!!), my first grant. . .and then my second grant for this project. I have a total budget of not quite $12,000 and I’ll be very interested to see what I can get for that. My sister once called me “cheap as hell,” so I have high hopes.

I’m creating two trunks for 3rd-5th grade to be ready for the 2026/27 school year:

1. One focusing on the indigenous people, as well as native plants and animals of Oregon. Oregon provides funding to all of the tribes to create tribal curricula that all teachers can use for free. The curricula is super cool and beautifully put together, but the teacher has to know it exists, print it out, gather resources. Now it’ll all be in one place in our trunk.
2. A second focusing on what it was like to be a kid at the time of our city’s incorporation (1889) to………I’m not sure yet. My original thought was 1950, but that might be too big of a span. Yet stopping before WWII seems weird. So we’ll see.

I’ve met with the Oregon Historical Society and the Montana Historical Society to learn more about their programs, as well as some smaller history orgs. I’ve also met with and will meet with the various tribal educators. I want to make sure I’m representing their work correctly, and have contacts for commissioning items from indigenous artists and craftspeople.

My city has a fairly robust historical society and local history section at the library. I’m confident I’ll find useful materials, but I am a little nervous about creating lesson plans, since I’m starting from scratch. The public library is a Carnegie library; the National Park Service has a lesson plan on Carnegie libraries. (I have downloaded it, just in case.)

Anyway, I called the library to see if they had the original documents related to its founding. “Good question. I’ll have to get back to you,” the librarian said. The next day, the head librarian called me to say they did have some documents! When I explained this project, she said to let her know how she/the library could help. I was like, “Ma’am, I will be knocking down your door!”

The first trunk is focusing on aquatic animals. I need to find a model of a lamprey. Those are not popular animals???? Though I want a class set of the plush one I found on Amazon. I want to include information about the tribes themselves, but those lessons aren’t as balanced as the animal ones, so we’ll see how that works out.

For the second, I have bits and pieces I need to start combining. I’m a huge nerd so I gotta take myself out of the equation when it comes to imagining what kids want to learn.