Jamestown Settlement

 We spent the weekend in Williamsburg with Grandma and Grandpa. We decided to take advantage of home school days in Williamsburg, and an upcoming history unit, and purchased tickets to Jamestown Settlement.

One thing that Aliza has already this year in history is map directions--north, south, east, west. She enjoys showing off her knowledge--the directions she gives are always like she is looking at a paper. So when she was trying to tell her Daddy which direction he was driving he opened up the compass on his ipad. Aliza LOVED it! She told us every 3.2 seconds which direction we were driving and Josiah took great delight in countering her direction with the exact opposite. I admit it was one of those proud home school parent moments. Jeremy and I were grinning.

And since I can say whatever I want to here... It is our opinion that if Aliza was in traditional school she really wouldn't give a care about a compass and using one, especially on the weekend when we were on "vacation". We also doubted if we would have even known that Aliza learned map directions to encourage her new found knowledge.

 Welcome to Jamestown Settlement! I was learning right along with the rest of family on this trip. There was so much interesting information. We only barely scratched the surface.

 The artillery demonstration was about to start when we arrived so we headed straight to the dock. This was a very interesting presentation. Of course the children were scared to death of the impending BOOM so I ended up taking them a distance away.

 We toured the biggest boat. Aliza and Josiah were both excited to look in every space.

 Because it was home school days, there were a few period games set up for the children to try.

 In the game below, a feather was attached to a corn cob and you try to throw it through the grape vine ring. This would have been an Indian game--for boys as young as 3 to learn aim.

 Here we are in the English fort. The lady in red was so knowledgeable. She did a great job of asking Aliza questions. She is showing us a well that was filled with garbage. They used bad wells for garbage disposals and now we can learn a lot about the settlers from what they threw away. 

 Trying on armor!

 We had to stop for lunch and then visited the Indian village. This lady is a tour guide, but Aliza was thoroughly convinced that she was a princess. Plus Aliza's favorite American girl doll is Kaya, an Indian.

 As soon as Grandma took the picture Aliza jumped up and said, "Ewww. I was sitting on animal skins!" There were more than a few animal skins in every hut. The contrast between the Indian village and English fort was stark and made quite an impression on me.

 Making corn meal.

 We met the "Indian Princess" again. She tried to engage Aliza in helping her carve a fish hook from the bone of a deer toe, but Aliza thought that was too gross to do. So, instead, Aliza and Anna worked on smoothing a stone for an arrowhead on sandstone. Aliza really enjoyed that.

Another "Indian" was melting deer hooves over a hot embers to make glue. Aliza helped fan the embers with a fan made of feathers.

 By then we had three very tired children and 4 pretty tired adults! That was enough for one day. Only the history portion of our day was over...there was plenty more fun to be had!