Ramblings of a Mommy: Who are the Pilgrims?

I've been playing with the idea of teaching the girls a little bit of history and geography

with Thanksgiving coming up.

However, I was a little late thinking about this.

I tried to put books on hold at the library, only to realize that I'm 10th in line

(which means I won't get them until Christmas).

Lately, I've begun looking for videos of people reading the books I can't get my hands on.

Today, however, I used Amazon's "Look Inside" feature because for the book I wanted to read, it previews the first 15 pages. WINNER! We read the book together in front of my laptop, looking at the pages :)

This is how we read the story this morning.

The brilliant part is that we could toggle back and forth between the story and an interactive map.

SOURCE

We talked about England and Holland and the "New World", where the Pilgrims wanted to go.

Charlotte wasn't sure about where the states were in the "United States, so it was helpful to have an interactive map where we could zoom in to show her Colorado, Virginia, etc.

I'm roughly following Caroline Allen's "Day 1" of

The History of Thanksgiving (a unit study of Thanksgiving) with a few changes.

After the story, we talked about the word "Pilgrim" and completed a Do-a-Dot

from Our Little Monkey's Thanksgiving printable pack.

Both of the girls LOVE these and including one is a no-brainer at this point.

Afterward, Charlotte used our first word from

Homeschool Creation's Thanksgiving Read-Build-Write list

I noticed today that Charlotte sat in her chair sometimes and sometimes

would sit on her knees on the floor. I love that this desk is perfect for both!

She is a wiggly-girl and sometimes knees not being in a chair is better for her.

While Charlotte built the word - Pilgrim -

Adelyn used Wikki Stix to make capital Ps on our whiteboard

Of course Charlotte always joins in with whatever Adelyn is doing :)

After a few minutes of break to play with wikki stix,

we worked together to sort pictures that started with P from those that did not.

This sort came from Homeschool Creation's Thanksgiving printable pack for Kindergarteners.

I love all of these free packs, but I sort of pick and choose what I use from each one.

Much of it is repetitive and doesn't fit my girls perfectly.

The great part is that I get to choose!

One of the things I loved about Day 1 in the "History of Thanksgiving" unit is that she says to make paper doll pilgrims. I found a lot of these and they looked kind of cool.

However, I found these Pilgrim People last night and thought they would stimulate more pretend play.

We'll make the Native American another day.

Today was only about Pilgrims.

There was lots of cutting, gluing...

…and rolling!

This craft took much longer than I thought for me and the girls to do.

I like for them to have as much autonomy as possible, so total it probably took us over an hour.

I love that the girls could really do most of the cutting themselves.

You can see that their skill level is quite different, but both of their pilgrims are adorable!

While we waited for the Pilgrim boys' hats to dry, we realized it was almost 10:30 in the morning and no one had eaten breakfast! We grabbed some cereal and played a memory game from the Nomenclature cards from Mama's Monkey's pack.

There are so many ways to use nomenclature cards and

I've found that I love having them in all of my unit's!