Unit Study: Colonial Williamsburg, Day Two

Today was Day Two of our very informal, loose unit study on Colonial Williamsburg.

The girls wanted to pretend that this was my library storytime program, so they brought their "children" and they were "moms".  I read two simple books, but both had excellent glossaries and we learned that colonial means a person living in a place that is under the rule of a distant country.  We also learned that when iron is heated and the shape is changed, the iron has been forged.



We learned that a magazine refers to a building used
store guns and ammunition.  Which lead to questioning why periodicals are called magazines and a loooong, unfruitful internet search.  A likes Ask.com and came up with a lot of interesting search questions.  P tried Google.  I tried wikis and encyclopedia and we could not find anything on the history of why magazines are called magazines, but we did learn that the first magazine was published in the 1700s and the first successful American magazine was the Saturday Evening Post.

After that, we did most of the activities in A Colonial Williamsburg Activities Book by Jean Bethell and Susan Axtell, which were simple but fun and gave us a preview of what we will see when we go to Colonial Williamsburg.

Then we finally got around to making beds and straightening the house.  Of course, I checked all of my online haunts and saw that Jessica's girls were finishing baking camp, which inspired A to pull out the cookbooks and make a list of some ingredients we needed.

The plan was to run to the store for some ingredients, but then A's ear started bothering her.  She was actually crying it hurt so bad.  Fortunately, we have an awesome doctor who saw her immediately: she has swimmer's ear and a middle ear infection.  So we got all of our ingredients at the store when we picked up her Rx, but it was too late to bake so we got some Chinese take-out and called it a day!