Learning about the pilgrims and fun activities.

Last year I had the opportunity to review several books by Susan Kilbride and I have been holding on to them for when we were ready to learn about the Pilgrims.  If you want to see my original review of the books, you can find it here.  The author has put together an additional website site that gives several activities that you can use with these books and we have been trying out a few these last couple of days.  You can find the Mrs. Kilbride site here.  We chose a few activities to try at home while reading the Pilgrim Adventure.

First we tried making some sea biscuits that we read the pilgrims ate on their long sea voyage.

The recipe is very to follow and make just flour salt and water

we made ours round shaped instead of square:)

Out of the oven, they didn't look too bad. 

We tried one straight out of the oven and the kids thought they weren't too bad:)

Later we tried a biscuit after it had time to harden and it is very hard to eat.     I was surprised to see that for the next couple of days the kids continued to eat the biscuits, saying that they weren't that bad...I was worried they would break their teeth:)!

 Next we tried a few games that were played by the Indians or pilgrims.  The first is called Quoits which I quickly made using some supplies we had on hand around the house.  It is a simple game of taking round cords and trying to toss it over a post.

Kids started just a couple feet away and found it very hard to do

They kept moving closer to the post

Until we had success:)

Next we played an Massasoit Indian game called Hubbub, we used modern playing pieces (things we had laying around the house).  The Native Americans would have used natural items such as bone. sticks or stones:)

This game is a game of chance where the kids threw 5 pennies into a bowl and depending on how many showed head or tails determined how many counters they earned each turn (we used marbles for the counters)  

Kids enjoyed the game so much they played it several times.  

There are several other activities that can be used to go along with this book that we didn't used this time around as we have done them in past lessons over the years, such as:

Making a quadrant
Making an Indian meal
Family Tree
and making a pilgrim pocket (which would make a great sewing project)

We are wrapping up our history lessons for pilgrims and going to read Mrs. Kilbride's next 2 book in the America series King Philip War Adventures and Salem Adventures.  I look forward to trying out some more of her activities that go along with the books.

Recently Mrs. Kilbride has come out with the 4th book in the series called The Revolutionary War Adventures and I was given the opportunity to review her new book.  That review will be coming shortly.

Disclosure:  I was not paid to do another post for Mrs. Kilbride but we really enjoyed her books and the children enjoyed the activities we found on her website.