The Mayflower

We're continuing our History of Thanksgiving unit!

Yesterday, the girls started by painting the bottom of two milk jugs, 

without knowing what we would do with them later!

Charlotte was super diligent with this task!

We came upstairs and read more pages from the virtual book.

Then, the girls watched a video about the Mayflower.

I wasn't sure how much this would hold their attention, but they really listened!

They actually begged to watch this same video after nap time.

Who knew?

We read a lot of facts about what life was like on the Mayflower.

Then, using the numbers of passengers, we did a replica with a 100s board.

There were 50 men, 20 women, and 32 children.

The girls used dried beans to represent each group.

They chose the largest lima beans for the "Men",

kidney beans for "Women", and black beans for the kids.

I asked the girls a bunch of questions about the groups.

How many women, men, children?

Were there more women or men (etc) ?

How many more children were there than women (etc)?

Charlotte's reasoning skills have really taken a bump up the last couple of months.

With "How many  more" questions, she knows automatically to discount the amount from the smaller group and count the extras.  For example, when I asked her how many more children than women, she held her fingers on two lines of 10 on the board, and then just counted the extra 12.

We learned the second verse of our song.

I wrote it on the board for Charlotte mostly (because she can sort of read it).

It has been pretty effective because she sings it each time she walks in the room.

We finished with calendar time!

We had a playdate scheduled, so we stopped and went to Treehouse Discovery.

After quiet time, Charlotte cut out the sails and flags for our Mayflowers.

She helped hole punch the sails. 

As you can see, it was pretty hard work :)

By the time Adelyn was up, we headed to a friend's house for dinner,

so we didn't actually finish out Mayflowers.

I used the sails and straw idea from this resource,

This morning, we finished our lesson.

We used a little brown play dough to stick our straws in.

I drew the two flags from the Mayflower because 

I couldn't find them anywhere to print.

Our Pilgrims fit! YAY for pretend playing tools :)

We didn't do our "Read-Build-Write" words yesterday, so I thought 

we could use our freshly-made play dough to cut and build the 3 words.

I didn't expect Adelyn to make it through all 3 words, 

but amazingly on Daddy's lap, we can do anything (with a princess dress on!)!

Finishing "mining" all of our letters before putting the letters in order!

Our 3 words: Pilgrim - Mayflower - Hat

After finishing, we tried to see how many "-at" words we could rhyme

One of the unexpected things that I really love about having my laptop, desk, and printer right in our loft is my ability to print something on the fly.  I save lots of resources, but don't use all of them.

Charlotte has been getting up from quiet time and telling me she wants to do "some school".

Instead of going to a new topic, it's really great to just be able to print a color-by-number Pilgrim, or Dot-to-Dot Mayflower, etc that will reinforce what we're learning.  This way I only print things as we need them instead of wasting things that the girls don't get to.  Win-win!