Little house on the Prairie -pioneer times unit.

It's been a busy month and my computer time has been limited. I used alot of fun activities this month but the one I am doing now, I want to share as I go. I will catch up on the others later. We are doing a pioneer times unit using My First Little House on the Prairie Series of books. A friend of mine shared the idea of doing this unit several years ago and this is the second year my teaching team is doing this unit. It is alot of fun helping children see what children were like in the past. The first day we explored the way the children were like todays children and the ways they were different. It is neat to see the children realize, there were no TVs or Wii's etc. One of the books Winter time in the Big Woods talked about how Mom would let the girls use her sewing thimble to draw on the frosty windows. We used the thimbles in our classroom with finger paint and drew on paper. Great for fine motor because they have to hold the thimble, since their fingers are to small to hold the thimble on. This book also talks about how when it was baking day Mom would give the girls a piece of bread dough to play with and then cook. This week we will be using the frozen bread dough thawed and roll it out into a snake to make our first initial of our name. last year we actually made 4 squares of a 9 patch quilt by precutting the fabric and letting the children place it. It was neat but this year I wanted to talk more about the activity and how Laura's sister Mary got to make the pattern bear claw since she was older. I used scrapbooking paper and let them decide which one to make after a couple of days of playing with the paper and using 9 squares. I will be sharing more about this tomorrow, I will take a picture of their work it is very clever. It was just like playing with tanagrams and I love to see their face when they figure the patterns out, or even while they are puzzling over it and thinking it through. More on this later........