How many times have you been on a tour and the guide rambles on and on and on and…..? You find yourself zoning out, no longer hearing a word the guide says, and you wonder to yourself, “Will anyone notice if I move on to something else?” All of us have been there and, for guests with very short attention spans, a guided tour can be sheer torture.So how do you keep your guests from getting bored? One technique is to incorporate artifacts into your tour. Rather than pointing to artifacts in exhibits along the way, try sporadically passing around a couple of small objects from your education collection. For example, let guests handle a boll of cotton or tufts of wool while talking about spinning wheels and clothing production. Not only will these unexpected hands-on encounters delight and entertain your guests, but they will enhance the learning experience as well. When visitors are allowed to interact with and connect physically to artifacts, it is often easier for them to make connections between people, events, and places of the past. Holding the artifact somehow makes “history” seem more tangible and authentic.
