Our First “Prairie Tuesday”

Please forgive us for starting our Prairie Tuesdays on a Wednesday, but I simply had to do a bit of a test run yesterday, in preparation for upcoming Tuesdays.  I have to admit I was also just excited about the fun of it and didn’t want to skip it this week just because I thought of it late on Tuesday.   I’ll use bullet points for the things I considered lessons, whether it’s something just talked about or a written lesson or craft.

We were so excited we forgot our bonnets!  I called Michaela a bit early yesterday and told her it was Prairie Tuesday.  She looked at me with a funny expression and said, “But mommy, it’s Wednesday.” 

• After a bit of explanation, she got up and put on some leggings a little “petticoat” and a dress.  (I’ve got to make her some pantaloons! )

The day started out with:

• a brief discussion about 1800s children having many more chores than children of today.   They cared for younger siblings, helped with cooking and farming, and helped to make candles and things needed for the home, and more.

Children of the 1800s certainly wouldn’t get up and have a bowl of Cheerios and then visit Webkinz World before getting to work.  So we had a major chore to do before we could eat breakfast!

We took the wagon to get some large stones to outline our 1800s kitchen garden.  I know Princess of the Universe looks totally smile-less in the picture above, but I promise she had fun.  I pulled her in the wagon on the way down and we took turns pulling the large rock we found on the way back up.  By the time we placed it as the cornerstone in the kitchen garden, Michaela was “starving.”  We went inside and had our breakfast, which included some of the mulberries we picked fresh the day before.

• We talked about food and how much of the food eaten had to be grown by the family and then stored, how some things were traded for, and how many things were only available when ”in season.”  I hope to expand on this lesson as I learn more. 
• We looked at roadside plants on our walk and identified those that we could.  We talked about how people from the 1800s — adults and children alike — would have been familiar with the types of plants growing around them.  They were used as food and medicine.

The rose above may be Rosa carolina, but I want to have another look at it today and make sure.  There are several species that look similar at a glance, but there are some defining characteristics that I did not check for yesterday.   In the fall, rose hips, rich in vitamin C, could be used for jellies and syrups.  We also noted red clover, poison ivy, and Queen Anne’s lace (or wild carrot).  

• Children of long ago had to know their plants.  When asked to go out and gather herbs for the stock pot, they had to be careful not to confuse wild carrot with poison hemlock.  How’s that for responsibility?

• For arithmetic yesterday, Michaela did a page of problems in this old math book, Ray’s New Primary Arithmetic.  We had to go to the back of the book to the word problems, because she is beyond primary math at this point, but the word problems definitely made her think.  For example:

“How many pine-apples, at 10 cents each, will pay for 5 peaches, at 6 cents each?”

or

“If 6 men can do a piece of work in 8 days, how long will it take 4 men to perform it?”

You definitely don’t have to use this particular book.  You could easily make up word problems that are applicable to your pretend farm!

I was looking at this 8th grade final exam from 1895 and marveling at how the context of what children learn in school has changed.  This would be a very difficult test for me because I don’t have to work and think in most of these terms anymore.

The next book we’ll be using is Lincoln’s Devotional, which I happen to have a fairly old (1957), beautiful copy of.   It’s basically a book containing verses from scripture, one for each day of the year. Bible was taught as an integral part of lessons in most home and public school settings. We’ll use this for reading and copywork.

As an aside, I loved reading this about Abraham Lincoln in Carl Sandburg’s introduction:

Of course, we have some old readers that we’ll read and take copywork from as well. (I love the illustrations!)

One of our really fun lessons yesterday was making butter!

• Making Butter
• You need simply a container of heavy whipping cream (we used 16 oz.)  and some jars with lids. 
• Fill a jar about half full of whipping cream, put the lid on and shake.  (We each had our own jar.)  After about 5 minutes this whipping cream will start to become thick and frothy.  Keep shaking.  Eventually it should harden and turn into butter, and you may even have it separate into butter and buttermilk, depending on how much butterfat is in the whipping cream you buy.  You can use the butter and drink the buttermilk.  (They didn’t waste anything in the 1800s!)

Our whipping cream got thicker and thicker and ended up being like whipped butter.  It tasted yummy — like real butter, but mild and light.  We didn’t end up with any buttermilk. 

Papa Bear, who grew up on a working dairy farm and who milked cows every day and grew up drinking raw cow’s milk to his heart’s content, explained to us about butter.  When you have a bucket of milk from the cow, over time the cream will rise to the top.  You can scoop that off; it’s full of butter fat.  When you churn it, the butter will form, just like when shaking the jars, only I imagine raw milk fresh from the cow would be amazingly and deliciously different.  Maybe we can actually do something like this some time! 

For supper last night we boiled a chicken.  We pretended that we had to go out and kill it.  I even fried the chicken liver, which was yummy, and Michaela studied the chicken heart and looked at the chambers.  (Don’t worry, we washed our hands really good.)  Later on, we had chicken and dumplings, and bread with our homemade butter.  Yum. 

• For writing yesterday, Michaela wrote her first letter as an 1800s farm girl.  It was full of adventure.  That’s all I’m going to say, as I plan to mail it out to a wild west cousin.  I just need to copy it first so I’ll have a copy for her notebook.

After yesterday, a million fun lessons are swirling around in my mind.  We have seeds to plant, a sampler to make, clothes to sew, games to play, and so much more.  I can’t wait until next Tuesday! 

I’ll leave you with a picture from one of our garden beds and a list of books I’ve pulled out to use, so far:

Lincoln’s Devotional
Ray’s New Primary Arithmetic
Little House in the Big Woods – We love the edition with Garth Williams’ illustrations.
Nancy Hanks of Wilderness Road: A Story of Abraham Lincoln’s Mother
All of our McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers
Little House on the Prairie