The Western Development Museum had a much quieter holiday season this year, but programs coordinator Karla Rasmussen said the museum is taking the changes in stride as it looks ahead to 2021.
Because of the ongoing COVID-19 restrictions, the WDM wasn’t able to host most of the annual holiday programming that many look forward to each year, including the regular school programs and kids events.
Instead, staff adapted some of the usual programs to be online — hosting the A Christmas Long Ago program by video, for example — and created a few other fun low-contact activities to fill the calendar.
The WDM in Moose Jaw put together a creative scavenger hunt, asking visitors to find all the gingerbread people hidden in the museum to solve a riddle and win a prize, and also collaborated with Regina artist Timothy Senko to offer free colouring pages to print at home.
The response to the different activities was good, said Rasmussen, although certainly less than the usual Christmas enthusiasm the museums sees each year.
“Some of the things we've done verbally, in-person, we were kind of forced to rethink and spell things out differently for a scripted reading at home,” said Rasmussen. “We tried to adapt all our material we would normally do, into something that classes or home-learners could do at their own leisure and we did have some good uptake on that.”
But she felt this year was a unique opportunity, as all four WDM locations in the province were offering their own online tours and modified activities available for anyone to access virtually.
For the first time ever, regular programming hosted at the WDMs in Yorkton, Saskatoon and North Battleford was suddenly available to individuals who may have never had the chance to experience that — which Rasmussen said is a positive result of the not-so-positive circumstances.
“Maybe there’s students in Moose Jaw who have never been up to the Saskatoon museum, for example,” said Rasmussen. “I think we’ve been able to reach some of those communities that have maybe never come to a WDM before, so that’s exciting and I’m looking forward to doing more of that.”
The new activities seemed to be a hit, said Rasmussen, and so the WDM already has plans to keep things up in 2021, as long as the pandemic continues to restrict regular programming.
Monthly scavenger hunts are on the way, with the chance to win a small prize. Staff are also digging through the WDM’s archives to share old recipes, and filming regular storytime videos.
“These are some of the things we've been compiling since the first lockdown, as one of the first things we did was think, ‘What can we do with existing materials to put online, so folks are still thinking and learning about the WDM at home?’” said Rasmussen. “One of our staff members has been pulling out older Saskatchewan recipes from the WDM collection and he’s doing little video shoots with them, where he actually makes the product, talks about the history of the item, and shares it on our website.”
A new activities tab is also available on the WMD’s website, offering free activities pages, craft ideas, colouring sheets and spot-the-difference challenges featuring different items and displays in the museum.
For Rasmussen, she’s most looking forward to collaborating even further with the other three WDM locations in the province, to offer even more residents the chance to experience the WDM’s unique charms.
“It's something neat to look forward to, that we’ll be able to have people in our area take part virtually [in other locations’ programs],” said Rasmussen. “I feel like even when we’re able to go back to those in-person things, this has really expanded our accessibility and that’s something we’re really striving for, to be as inclusive as possible.”
Even with all the new online offerings, the WDM does still remain open to in-person visitors as well, with just a few COVID-19 procedures in place to ensure everyone’s safety, said Rasmussen.
“It was nice to see more faces around the Christmas holidays, and we want to make sure everyone is still safe,” said Rasmussen. “One thing we’ve done here is change some of the directional flow in the galleries themselves, so we have a map when visitors come in [and] there’s sanitizing stations throughout the galleries.”
For more information on the Western Development Museum, visit wdm.ca.
