Problems in Plymouth - The Tepee vs. The Wigwam

We finished up reading the sixth book in The Imagination Station series by Marianne Hering and Marshall Younger, this weekend. It's the first book in the series in which I've noticed glaring historical inaccuracies. Of course, that might be due to the other books we've been reading at the same time...


...such as Bonnie Shemie's Houses of bark - tipi, wigwam and longhouse...


...or The Wigwam and the Longhouse by Charlotte and David Yue, which inspired the older girls to build a pipe cleaner wigwam, earlier in the week.


When the time traveling cousins from The Imagination Station headed to Plymouth, were captured by Indians, and found themselves being held in a tepee, and not just a conical, bark covered tepee-like wigwam, but a full blown, hide covered, tent-type tepee, we were a little thrown off. Then, when they met an Indian "chief" in a full feather war bonnet, we were dumbfounded.

I'm not sure why the authors would have gone to enough trouble to research the lives of the Pilgrims, to the point of knowing they did not always dress in black, or wear buckles on their hats, but then present them as living near native tribes more like the Lakota Sioux, than the eastern tribes the Pilgrims would have actually encountered. The inaccuracy seems strange for a history based series.

We decided to build a quick model tepee, to compare with our wigwam, by lashing three pipe cleaners, with blobs of clay on the bottoms for stability, together into a tripod.


We started to add additional "poles", but discovered the pipe cleaners were too thick for the job, so we just stuck with the original three...


...and moved on to making a covering, by cutting a crumpled, semi-circle out of packing paper, with a radius slightly smaller than our pipe cleaners.


We wrapped the straight edge of the semi-circle around the pipe cleaner frame, to form a cone, taping it in the back...


...and cutting a slit, to make a door flap in the front.



It's not at all the way a real tepee would be covered, but it was good enough to give the children the idea of the simplicity of the "tent" design - perfect for the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains, and nothing like the somewhat permanent dwellings of the more settled, eastern tribes.



NativeAmericanLanguages.org has an excellent, picture filled page, comparing and contrasting Native American dwellings, and building styles, that we found especially helpful. You might want to check it out. Or, click over to the What My Child Is Reading link-up at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns to find out what other families have been reading and are recommending, this week.


It's great to be a homeschooler.

Preserving Apples Like a Pioneer (at heart, anyway)

We're up to our elbows in apples this week, thanks to friends being up to their necks in them, and insisting we take a box home with us after church on Sunday.

There's just something about a big box of apples on a cold fall morning, to make a person feel like a pioneer, filling up the pantry, or root cellar if we had one, preparing for the winter ahead.

The girls jumped right in, following instructions from Barbara Greenwood's A Pioneer Sampler: The Daily Life of a Pioneer Family, for drying apples in the oven.


It's not exactly the way the pioneers would have done it, but it was a lot of fun for them to slice up cored and peeled apples...


...arranging them in a single layer on a greased cookie sheet, to dry in a 175 degree Fahrenheit oven (as low as ours would go)...


...turning them every hour for even drying.


The book suggested six hours of drying time, but ours only took three. Of course, we only had room on the cookie sheet for slices from about three apple - so it could take days to preserve the entire box worth that way. But then, we subtracted two more, sliced up fresh for lunch, and another five or six pounds worth for making apple butter, also a pioneer favorite.

In fact, we found instructions for turning apple sauce into apple butter using the oven, in David C. King's Pioneer Days, from the American Kids in History series.


But, since we were starting out with apples instead of apple sauce, and we wanted to keep the oven free for drying apples, and regular use, we opted for the "all day" crock pot method. I think I originally found the recipe at AllRecipes.com, but we've been using it for years. It's so simple. All you have to do is peel and chop apples into a crock pot...


...dump in about four cups of sugar, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, 1/4 teaspoon of ground cloves, and two teaspoons of cinnamon (though from the looks of the picture below, I'm pretty sure I grabbed a tablespoon by mistake)...


...mix it all together...


...cover the crock pot, and let it simmer on high for an hour...


...then turn the crock pot down to low, and let the apples bake down for the rest of the day - somewhere around 10 hours, stirring everyone once and a while (a good job for supervised little ones)...


...until it looks something like this.


I like to plop the whole mess, carefully, into a blender to smooth it out...


...and back into the crock pot, uncovered, on low...


...until a spoonful can cool in a dish, without any water pooling around the edges.


Then, I know it's ready to transfer into clean freezer containers for cooling, and storing in the freezer, safely set aside for Thanksgiving rolls, and Christmas toast.


First though, I thought we should sample a bit, to make sure it was to our liking. We didn't mind the extra cinnamon...


...but the children were divided on the use of apple butter in place of jelly in their peanut butter sandwiches. They loved the leaf cut-outs (an idea from Little Nummies) though, especially once they realized I'd saved the cut-outs, so they could put the bread back together for eating.


You can click the link above to view Little Nummies original, cuter version, of the sandwich.

Or, click over to The Ramblings and Adventures of a S.A.H.M.'s Whatcha Making Wednesdays link-up, if you're in a baking with kids kind of mood, or over to the History and Geography link-up hosted by All Things Beautiful for more history and geography themed projects and ideas for children.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Fox and Geese - Pilgrim Games

It's that time of year, when the best way to pass a cold, blustery afternoon is to stay inside with a board game.

And if the game happens to be Fox and Geese, a 17th century strategy game, possibly even enjoyed by Pilgrim adults and children alike, at least according to the historians at Plimoth.org, where we found the template for the board below, so much the better.


There are several different ways to set up the game, using buttons, beads, seeds, or even rocks for playing pieces...


...but the basic premise of the game is usually the same.

One player, the fox (playing with the black button in our case), removes or "eats" the geese of his opponent (the red beads on our board), by jumping over them checker style, and removing them from the board.

The second player, using the geese, tries to trap the fox into a position where it can't move or jump. Players get one move per turn, alternating play back and forth, until all the geese are gone, or the fox is trapped.

The fox can move or jump vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, but the geese can only move vertically, or horizontally.

The pictures above and below show two different starting positions for the pieces, using one fox and 17 geese, but the game can also be played with only 15 geese, and there is a version using two foxes.


You can use the board, set up as below, for a slightly different game of solitaire, where the object is to jump one piece over another, removing jumped pieces, until only one piece remains (we have yet to manage it).


Fewer pieces can be used, ignoring the outer spaces, for slightly easier play.


You can even play an online version of the game at MIStupid.com. Just imagine what the Pilgrim's would think of that!

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Happy Mayflower Day!

Did you know today is Mayflower Day? At least, that's what I read on About.com, Family Crafts' Long List of September Holidays, where I find most of the obscure "national" days we like to celebrate. And, Wikipedia does mention, that the Mayflower left England on September 16, 1620 (if you're going by the Gregorian calendar, anyway), arriving in the New World 66 days later, making it, according to Peter Cook, "A Trip That Took Entirely Too Long".

I didn't figure the younger children, especially, have a real concept of just how long 66 days is. So, I decided, at the last minute, to try to put together something in our paint program, so they would have 66 Mayflowers, to place on the calendar each day, starting today, to mark the length of the journey.

What you see below, is a work in progress. It's where I was at, when we decided really, we needed to celebrate the day properly, by launching our own Mayflower in the little creek, in front of the library, downtown.


We didn't have any walnut shells, so we settled for a milk cap Mayflower. There was quite a bit of discussion as to whether we had used too much clay, to hold our sail up.


The older children were pretty sure it was going to sink like a rock...


...which it did, pretty quickly.


But, no matter, we pulled it out of the watery depths, removed a little of the clay...


...and launched it again.


This time, it stayed afloat, caught the current, and with a tiny bit of assistance, made its way down the creek.


In fact, it looked to me like the current was going to carry it right to its own "Plymouth rock", if not for the hand of a waiting child. Apparently, the librarians have asked all the children in town to be careful not to let things get stuck against the grate, where they can block the flow of water. And, apparently, I have a number of rule abiding citizens living in my house.


They did agree to let me symbolically plant the sail on the rock, with a tiny bit of clay, just long enough to snap a picture of our journey's end...


...before we returned home, to mark the beginning of the historic journey.



It's great to be a homeschooler.