Camp Floyd field trip

I read that Camp Floyd, which is a historical site about an hour away, was having a "Johnston's Army encampment" day during our unit. Johnston's Army is the army that came out to Utah during the "Utah War," and we members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have no warm feelings toward them, that's for sure! It was in 1857, a little before the Civil War, but the uniforms and weapons of the soldiers were similar to Civil War times. And Camp Floyd is the place they were stationed. So I decided we'd go out there for a field trip.

We'd seen Civil War reenactors before at Fort Douglas, which is right in Salt Lake City. But I'd never been to Camp Floyd. I was surprised how small the State Park is, and how little there is to do. Ha! I would never have gone there if there weren't this event being held, but even with the event I was glad we'd brought a picnic so it didn't feel like a total waste of a trip! And it got more fun after the re-enacting soldiers started showing us things like how to fire a musket and what was in their knapsacks. There were even some fun little old-fashioned games over in a nearby field. So we did have a good time.

Gus rolling hoops

Carrying water

Stick horses

Building a log cabin

There's a little museum inside this Inn, which was a stagecoach stop and a stop for the Pony Express. There are some interesting period artifacts and furniture inside.

This is a key from the telegraph machine that was here

The hugest lilac tree I've ever seen!

Our favorite part was when the soldiers showed us how to load and fire real muskets

This soldier also had an authentic army rucksack with the items a solider would have carried—comb, razor, tooth powder, sewing kit, etc.

Clementine had fun just running all around!

On the way home there was a cool storm that framed Mount Timpanogos perfectly!

Robert E. Lee Cake, and a Civil War Unit Celebration

We had a big celebration at the end of our unit to display and present what we had learned. We invited some friends over so we had a fresh audience. :) It was really fun to set everything up and to plan what our celebration would include.

We debated what to do about food for quite awhile. There are Civil War-era recipes available, but the authentic ones often don't include very detailed instructions and I was worried about messing them up. And of course the soldiers weren't eating very good food . . . Finally I found a bill of fare for Lincoln's Second Inaugural Ball. This was interesting, because they were walking a fine line between celebration and austerity during this time. They wanted to celebrate the re-election, of course, but the war was still going on and it would have been insensitive to feast extravagantly. So the menu wasn't as fancy as it might have been.

I didn't want to make a bunch of new or difficult dishes that the kids couldn't help with as much, so we decided to do kind of a low-key dinner featuring some of the same dishes (the easy ones) as the Inaugural Ball.

Some items are quite interesting. I'm especially drawn to the "Ornamental Pyramides" (I don't know what it means) and the "Jellies and Creams"

Then for dessert, to make sure we had the South represented too, we made Robert E. Lee Cake. We learned that this cake is traditional in the South as a favorite dessert of Robert E. Lee, and people often serve it on "Lee-Jackson Day" (celebrated in Virginia the Friday before Martin Luther King Day). It's a really yummy lemon-orange chiffon cake with lemon curd filling and lemony frosting. It was fun to make and eat!

We used a recipe here, which was good because it included an earlier-era version of the recipe. I talked to the children about how recipes have changed over the years (with the advent of more precise measurements, oven temperatures, etc.) and how much you would have had to know before being able to cook something back in that era. I think it's pretty amazing that they were able to make beautiful desserts like this one back then, with their much more limited equipment and ingredients!

Robert E. Lee Cake

Another new recipe we tried for this dinner was "blanc mange," which was on the Inaugural Ball menu. I've often heard of it (usually in the context of someone "quivering like a blancmange":)) but I never knew what it was: basically, vanilla pudding. It was pretty easy to make and we really liked it---it's flavored with orange peel and cinnamon, and it has a really lovely smooth texture and cool flavor. We used this recipe here.

I figured two new-to-us recipes were enough for one day, but here are some other Civil War-era recipes we considered trying:

Mary Todd Lincoln cake

Applesauce Cookies

Johnnycake, biscuits, pork and bean soup, apple pie

others here and here

The rest of our dinner was simple (I just bought the deli ham and turkey, and chicken salad) but it was different enough from a regular dinner that it still felt like a real celebratory feast: 

Pyramide of Orange! :)

After dinner, we filled out the evening with the boys' oral presentations about their final projects, Abe reciting the Gettysburg Address for us, and watching an awesome Civil War movie: Buster Keaton's The General. It's a silent movie, so I wasn't sure how the children would like it, but I should have realized that silent movies are THE IDEAL movies for watching with children. You can talk and explain what's going on the whole time without missing anything! I just read the subtitles out loud (there aren't that many of them) for the younger children. And the movie is totally hilarious. We all loved it! It was the perfect way to celebrate our study of this fascinating period of history!

Abe gives the Gettysburg Address

Abe and I both memorized the Gettysburg Address during this unit. The two younger boys know large chunks of it, but they can't get through the whole thing without help.

I think I had memorized the Gettysburg Address, at least partially, sometime in the distant past, and of course it's all really familiar to me, but it was surprisingly hard to move from there to actually having it truly memorized. It's that last section---with all its "rather for us" and "for us the living, rather" and "to be dedicated here" and "to be here dedicated"---that really gets me. Abe and I were in gales of laughter as he tried to help me get it. And I finally did, and so did he. I think he does such a great job reciting this; he really gives the sense of the words as well as the words themselves. Which is good, because I feel like my Abraham ought to have a special bond with the words of Abraham Lincoln.

Here he is, wearing his Abe Lincoln beard and Daisy's magician hat from last year---which doesn't quite fit his head---but it adds a nice touch. :)

Civil War Unit Final Projects

As we entered the last week of our Civil War Unit, I assigned the three boys a final project on whatever Civil War subject they chose. I gave them a few guidelines (it had to be made with materials we had on hand; it had to be something they could do mostly by themselves; it had to include several written facts about the topic; etc.) and turned them loose. Abraham and Sebastian did literally their entire projects by themselves---there was much secrecy and intrigue so no one could see anyone else's project while it was being made. I helped Malachi with his, but only with the actual construction of it---the set-up and the materials were his own ideas. I was really, really impressed by how well they all did. At our Civil War Unit Celebration (we kept accidentally calling it our Civil War Celebration, which doesn't seem very good) they each gave an oral presentation where they talked about their projects and answered questions, and they did a great job. I loved seeing what they came up with!

Hard at work

Abraham's project was a display of Civil War artillery (guns and projectiles). He taught us that there are two kinds of artillery, guns (cannons) and howitzers (of which mortars are a type). He made models of all those, with their various parts labelled.

He also had a section for shells and balls---solid shot, canister shot, shells, etc. He painstakingly created these little canisters filled with poppyseeds to represent the gunpowder or grapeshot inside. It was awesome.

Cannon

Howitzer

Malachi's project was a model of the "ironclads"---the Monitor and the Virginia (or the Merrimack as many books called it).

The Merrimack was made of a big vinegar container cut in half and covered with duct tape. I helped cut the holes for the cannons (it is historically accurate with 14 gunports, four on the broadsides and three each on the bow and stern) and cut strips of duct tape for him to use. The smokestack is a toilet paper roll and the flag is taped onto a straw.

The Monitor was just a flat strip of cardboard with a gun turret (hairspray lid+toilet paper roll+strange cone-shaped duct tape structure) and the captain's box (foreground) was part of a matchbox. The smokestacks were straws as well. Malachi was disappointed that we couldn't figure out a way to make the gun turret turn around like it really did on the ship, but I thought it looked great just how it was.

Sebastian chose to make a depiction of the Battle of Fredericksburg. It's such an interesting (and sad) battle because of all the mistakes that were made----starting with the pontoon wagons arriving 10 days late, so the engineers had to build the pontoon bridges under heavy fire from the waiting Confederates on the other side of the river. Some Union soldiers actually had to paddle across the river in pontoons to provide some cover for the engineers while they finished up the bridges, so the rest of the army could cross.

 Seb explained the movements of the battle in great detail---I think stuff like this really fascinates him. The macaroni noodles on his poster represent artillery for both sides.

He wrote it as "Fredericks-'burg'", he told me, because it's spelled differently than St. PetersBERG and he prefers the -berg spelling. :)

I could go on and on about how much I like these projects, but I'll confine myself to a simple, "Good work, boys!" :)

Civil War map and timeline

Here's what our bulletin board held during the Civil War Unit. I highly recommend this map---we referred to it, put pins in it, looked up casualties on it, and lots of other things. It was a great visual reference. The sheer number of battles in the Civil War is just amazing; you learn about the big ones and you know that isn't all of them, but I don't think I ever realized just how many there were. We also had a timeline which we added to during the unit. It was really simple: just dates of things we thought were important, along with pictures to help us remember which battle was which.

Music of the Civil War, and Making Civil War Drums and Mallets

We made drums for the children to march around the house with, and to drum on while we sang or listened to music of the Civil War. I had a great songbook from the library that told about the songs as well as provided nice piano accompaniments. We loved singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic," "Battle Cry of Freedom," "Dixie," "Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last," and others.

On a side note, during our morning devotionals this unit, we sang through all the battle and war-related songs we could find in the hymnbook, and the children loved it SO MUCH. They would BEG to sing "just one more," and often we'd sing all 4 verses of four or five different songs in one morning. I don't blame them, as the martial hymns are some of my favorites too. There are lots of hymns with battle/armor of God imagery, but the ones we liked best were: [hymn numbers from the LDS Hymnbook]

#60 Battle Hymn of the Republic (of course)
#243 Let us All Press On
#246 Onward Christian Soldiers (when the children learned that this was written by Sir Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and Sullivan, they were thrilled. They love The Pirates of Penzance.)
#248 Up, Awake, Ye Defenders of Zion
#249 Called to Serve
#250 We are all Enlisted
#251 Behold, A Royal Army
#259 Hope of Israel

They were so delighted with all the talk of foes and regiments and captains. It was really cute.

Back to drums! We were "lucky enough" to have recently popped one of those big rubber balls that comes from cages at the grocery store, and I saved the rubber (plastic?) for this purpose. If we hadn't had the popped ball, I was planning to use some leftover vinyl from the carwash we made a few summers ago.

We used oatmeal containers, pineapple cans, and a potato flakes can for our drums, but of course you can use any container you want. We just opened one end of the container, stretched the rubber across, and taped it to keep it tight. Then we taped butcher paper around the body of the drums so we could decorate them.

This worked fine and I've made lots of this kind of drum in the past---however, we also found a method that I like even more: a packing tape drum. The great thing about this drum is that it actually has a pretty  nice sound, and you can get a decent double-bounce even without using real drumsticks! I was a drummer in high school/college, so I'm pleased about things like that. :) I loved playing the drums and I miss it!

I do have real mallets and sticks, but I never let the children use them, so we made our own out of craft foam and chopsticks. They are pretty good, for homemade mallets. The craft foam makes them a bit bouncy, and they're lighter than real sticks so they're good for little hands.

Here's how you make the mallets:

Cut a longish, thinnish triangle of craft foam. Tape the chopstick to the wide end of it, like this.

Roll the stick up in the foam toward the point of the triangle

Secure it with tape (or glue would be even better so you wouldn't have tape over your foam, but we never have the patience for glue to dry).

So, there are our Civil War drums. We had lots of fun with them. You can hear how they sound in these videos:

Me playing the tape drum with a really weird grip (the chopsticks were too short for me); you can hear its nice clear sound compared to the rubber ones

Drum cacaphony