BUENA VISTA TOWNSHIP - Melissa Buchner adjusted her black pillbox hat on her head and smoothed the skirt of her dainty black gown .

David Ricci, 9, imagined himself as an early 20th century traveler to Vineland.

And their third-grade classmates debated who would survive their hypothetical trip across the Atlantic in the doomed ship Titanic.

It turned out that Melissa and David were two of the lucky ones.

"We were studying disaster," explained Valerie Myerson, a teacher at St. Mary's Regional School, of how her students spent all day Friday imagining themselves as passengers on the doomed ocean liner.

While the class had taken a look back in history at the volcanic destruction of Pompeii in ancient Italy, and a molasses explosion in Boston, Myerson said the sinking of the Titanic after it struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage on April 14, 1912, grabbed the children's imagination.

"They just got so into it," she exclaimed, surrounded by her 27 students who had poured their enthusiasm into the Titanic-inspired costumes they wore to class.

Vicki Volpe, a teacher from Vineland High School, kicked off the day by sharing details and even artifacts from the ship with the students.

Meanwhile, parents had constructed a huge wall-frieze depicting the ship, which hung along the outside wall of the classroom and helped arriving students imagine they were "embarking."

In order to forge a connection with the people of that period, Myerson said, each child was assigned the identity of a real passenger who was onboard the ship during the fateful journey.

Their task was to research the person's background using web-based history and genealogy tools, and to arrive at class dressed in character.

For some, that inspiration came easily.

"I watch the Titanic movie every day," sighed one girl sporting a crimson gown. Others, especially the boys, found their jackets a little warm and left their hats sitting on the desks.

Amid the dress-up - and the screening of the older "Titanic" movie starring Barbara Stanwyck - many students pinpointed issues of class and race conflict that dominated at the time of the boat's sinking.

Saki Mertis, 9, learned from his research that his alias, Masabumi Hosono, was the only Japanese passenger on the boat. An employee of the Japanese government, he later lost his job and was denounced as immoral by those in Japan who thought he should have faced death rather than allow himself to be rescued, according to an entry in Hosono's diary.

Many other passengers, who were classified as second- or first-class, were foreigners arriving to be married and united with American citizens.

And among the first-class travelers were an Astor, a Guggenheim and a former congressman.

Some students said they were inspired by the traveler who survived the trip and made it to nearby Vineland. David Ricci portrayed B. Thomas Oxenham, who traveled from the boat's starting-point in England to visit his brother in New Jersey and later settled in Vineland in 1924.

"It's exciting - because we're from Vineland and he came to Vineland," Ricci said Friday.

The last historic detail came at lunchtime, when the students filled up on 1912-era lunch items, such as chicken, biscuits, nuts, chocolate clairs and clear soda - which Myerson said was in place of champagne.

That was historically accurate enough, said Jillian Enes, 8. "I wouldn't want to eat everything they had like squid."