The Pilgrims, the Mayflower, and More: Review

Oops! I found another draft that never got published! If you follow Sceleratus Classical Academy on facebook then you saw the pictures when we were doing this and were probably wondering where the post went. What happened is that we never finished the whole book, so I forgot to finish the post. Here it is now.

This thanksgiving we were actually home! So when the Scholastic Dollar Days sale was going on last time I picked up the eBook version of Easy Make & Learn Projects: The Pilgrims, the Mayflower & More: 15 Fun-to-Create Reproducible Models That Make the Time of the Pilgrims Come to Life. I usually prefer having hard copies of workbooks and things, but with the amount of scanning I would have had to do for this I am very glad I got the e-version. Also, with my scanner things get re-sized and then all the parts would not have been on the same, exact scale. I would never have paid the full Amazon price for it, but I'm delighted to have gotten this for only $1. They have sales quiet frequently, and I share the info whenever I hear about it. (If you're going to be traveling for Thanksgiving check out the Thanksgiving in the Car lesson plan I made for my holiday series at Sandbox to Socrates.)

There are a lot of paper models in this book. My boys aren't up to the amount of coloring and cutting required to finish all of the projects in a week, but that is what I wanted to do so I did quite a bit of the coloring and cutting before starting the lessons. I used these models along side the books Thanksgiving on Plymouth Plantation and Samuel Eaton's Day: A Day in the Life of a Pilgrim Boy, but there is enough information and teaching suggestions in the book that you do not "need" anything else to use the models.

I split the models into 5 days:

Day 1

Day 1: How they got there, and why: Exchanging Worlds Trifold Diorama: (double sided new world vs old world), Moving Mayflower Map, and Peek Inside Mayflower

For the trifold, Early Bird colored the "Old World" side and Builder Boy colored the "New World." That way we only had to make one and there wasn't too much coloring for them. On the moving map they each colored "their" continent. The Mayflower was left mostly uncolored except for the flag.

Day 2

Day 2: How they lived: Pilgrim Town and Wampanoag Village

I pre-colored the map parts and left the buildings and people for the boys to color. Early Bird did the Wampanoag village and Builder Boy colored the Pilgrim town. This took much longer than I expected even with the pre-colring I did.
 I thought we would also do the gardens this day but half way through the two villages I realized how unrealistic that was for us. They did have a lot of fun comparing and contrasting the two villages, so it was worth it. Mostly.

And that's all that we actually finished. The following is what I had planned.

Day 3: Food and how they cooked it: Pilgrim Vegetable Patch / Wampanoag Garden, Hunt for Food Match-Up / Trap a Fish, and What's Cooking Double Diorama (shows Pilgrims cooking and Wampanoag cooking)Same division of the vegetable patch/garden, though I did do some pre-coloring for them there as well so they wouldn't feel so overwhelmed, since they are rarely required to do anything like this.

Day 4 (Thanksgiving Day): Harvest Feast Fun-Fact Scroll

Day 5: How they dressed: Wampanoag Basket by Numbers, and Who wore what? (Pilgrim / Wampanoag wardrobes, Wampanoag pouch)

The models are all still up, three months later. The boys like to play with their fingers as people in the villages. They still remember a lot from what we talked about. Next Thanksgiving we will finish the models the week before Thanksgiving. That was my biggest mistake; thinking we could get it all done the week of Thanksgiving. But it was definitely worth it, and we'll be finishing it in November.

I definitely recommend this if you can get it during the Dollar Days sales. And if you have kids who enjoy coloring.

Pin It