On a recent gorgeous midsummer day, the Mary Baker Historic House in Lynn hosted a group of 43 lively students (and their five staff chaperones) from the Dream MORE summer program based at the Thurgood Marshall Middle School, about a 15-minute walk from 8 Broad Street. Dream MORE is a free program supported by LEAP for Education, a nonprofit that has funded extracurricular programs for youth from underserved communities in Massachusetts’ Essex County for more than 25 years. Longyear was delighted to have them reach out to us about bringing their students to this important historic site in Lynn and learning about Mary Baker Eddy.
This summer in their program, the students have been learning about the basics of photojournalism, so they were poised to take in all that they could with their eyes and their phone cameras! Once divided into five groups, these attentive kids rotated among five “learning stations”—one in the yard and the other four in the house—where Longyear staff members added to their knowledge about Mrs. Eddy and the history of this house.
In the yard they learned about some traditional 19th-century games, including hoop rolling and embroidery-ring toss and catch. Inside, they had a hands-on, learn-by-doing introduction to basic printing (using a mirror to check their work), then visited the first and second floor parlors to learn more of Mrs. Eddy’s story in this house. They finished with a more in-depth presentation on block printing and publishing in the skylight room, as they learned about Mrs. Eddy writing Science and Health. It seemed appropriate, somehow, that during the 150th-anniversary year of the publication of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, these students—completely “new” to Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science—should visit the house where she lived when she finished the first edition of the Christian Science textbook.
