Clothing History: A Timeline through (my favorite) Movies

It was an interesting exercise for me to put the movies I love into some sort of historical order. I hadn't even really placed many of them in time at all, and seeing which ones overlapped and which were historically more precise was really quite fun! In addition, we don't really watch movies in our family very often (at least the children don't). We generally have family movie night once every couple months, and we started that tradition maybe 5 years ago, so even the older children have probably only seen movies numbering in the dozens. Thus, there are a LOT of my favorite movies I had yet to introduce them to and I knew everyone would feel this was a VERY special unit!

I'm sure lots of these movies aren't costumed with complete historical accuracy, but they were good enough for our purposes. My main objective was to find a movie I LIKED (and that was child-appropriate) for each period, not just one that was accurate. And I suppose there aren't all that many movies I really love. This list covers most of them. There are a few I had to just stick in there because I couldn't think of anything else (Hercules!) but even those are at least movies I think are okay.

For this Clothing Unit, we only picked ONE movie to watch from each time period (marked with a *), but I put down all the movies I thought of in case we do this again someday, or in case someone else wants other ideas. That Victorian Period really has a wealth of great movies, eh? And I hard time thinking of any 80's-era movies I loved. I'm sure there's something I'm forgetting. :)

History of Flight, and Angel Food Cake with Pink Clouds

There are so many cool elements of the history of aviation! All the way from Icarus to Chinese kites to hot air balloons to the Wright Brothers to Amelia Earhart. There is a good overview here, but I think the best way to learn about it is just to get books and books and books from the library. There are SO many good ones! About all kinds of different aviators and all kinds of different flying machines.

We had previously learned about hot air balloons, which are a fascinating subject all by themselves. It would be fun to do some of those activities when talking about the history of flight. There are probably also some activities from our Bird Unit that would apply.

This was a funny video showing some flying machines that didn't work so well!

Here's a clip of the Wright Brothers flying their plane!

The children, even the older ones, had a lot of fun doing some of these historical aircraft dot-to-dots.

We watched this interesting documentary about Amelia Earhart's disappearance.

One of the books we read was called Eleanor and Amelia Go for a Ride, based on a true event where Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt flew together on a plane. There was a recipe at the end for "Eleanor Roosevelt's Angel Food Cake with Pink Clouds." An appropriately aero-centric treat! :) We made something similar, but I used my tried-and-true angel food cake recipe. The "pink clouds" are just blended up strawberries, folded into whipped cream. It was SO good!

Here's the recipe:

Angel Food Cake with Pink Clouds

1 1/2 c. egg whites (10-12), at room temperature
1 1/2 c. sugar, divided
1 c. sifted cake flour
1 tsp. cream of tartar
1/4 t. salt
2 tsp. vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
1/2 t. almond extract

In a small bowl, whisk together 3/4 c. sugar and cake flour. Set aside.

Beat egg whites in stand mixer until frothy, then add cream of tartar and salt. Beat until fully mixed, and then add the remaining 3/4 c. sugar, 1-2 T. at a time. When sugar has been added, beat egg whites to soft peaks. (They will look like soft waves, and when you lift the beaters, the egg whites will droop back down into the batter---not fall down in ribbons.) Once you have soft peaks, add vanilla and almond and beat for a few seconds to distribute.

Sift the flour/sugar mixture over the egg whites in 6-8 additions and gently fold it in after each addition. Do it with a spatula and be very slow and gentle so as not to deflate the eggs.

Spoon batter into a 9-inch tube pan with a removeable bottom. Smooth the top with a spatula and bake in the lowest half of the oven, at 325 for 55-60 minutes.

Remove from oven, invert pan over a bottle, and allow to cool completely. Gently run a thin knife around the sides, then around the bottom, of the pan to release the cake when you are ready to serve it. Slice with a serrated bread knife, and serve with berries, "pink clouds" or lemon curd.

"Pink Clouds":

Blend 6-8 strawberries, fresh or frozen, to make a thin berry sauce. Fold sauce into freshly whipped cream.

Oh—also—we saw this IMAX movie about the history of flight. And it was good. We wish there had been more planes in it, though. (There was lots of just scenery. Beautiful, but the airplanes were cooler.) The part that showed a bouquet of roses, making their way from Africa (or Ecuador? or somewhere) on various planes to finally end up on someone's bedside table in Alaska was our favorite part. We loved seeing that truly miraculous journey with new eyes.

Final Revolutionary War Celebration, and Apple Pie

Apple pie! A fine and verifiable American tradition, and thus the perfect dessert to accompany our final celebration. Here are a couple good links about the history of pie in America:

Cultural History of Apple Pie

History of Pie in America

We've never made a lattice-crust pie before, so that was fun

The sparkling sugar we sprinkled on top of the pie burned in a strange splotchy way, but otherwise, we thought it looked quite beautiful!

For our celebration, we watched my favorite history movie: A More Perfect Union. I probably watched it in school five or six times, but I still love it every time. (And we had watched it before as a family, during our Government Unit.) It's a production done quite awhile ago by BYU, and it has aged remarkably well—no embarrassing or dated parts, great music, great characters. I love it. It tells the (miraculous, really!) story of the Constitutional Convention. It really makes the events understandable and clear. I looked around to see if you could watch it online, and it doesn't look like you can, but it's totally worth buying. I could watch it every year! The children really liked it too.

Bunny Unit Schedule and Lesson Plan; Bunnies in Literature

Bunnies! Now there is a topic I've been waiting for my whole life. But when we got a bunny for Christmas, I knew that now was the time. Not for a vaguely applicable "mammals" unit---but for BUNNIES.

Is anyone else in the world bunny-loving enough to have a whole unit on this? Maybe not. But you might find it useful for Easter?

Here is the Pinterest Board for our Bunny Unit.

We watched the BBC documentary "The Burrowers," which talked about bunnies (along with moles and water voles). They built a burrow with one glass cross-section wall so they could observe the bunnies actually in the burrow. Very interesting. We found it on YouTube:
Part I
Part II
Part III

We spent one day talking about Bunnies in Literature, and we read all of our numerous Bunny Books. These are all books we love. And there are others---Watership Down comes to mind, and the other Peter Rabbit stories.

As part of our Bunny Celebration at the end of the unit, we watched the 2010 documentary "Rabbit Fever," about teens competing to become "Rabbit King" and "Rabbit Queen" at the American Rabbit Breeders Association convention. It was fascinating. It struck a good balance, too, between showing the idiosyncrasies in this group of rabbit enthusiasts while still allowing them to be sympathetic, multi-dimensional characters. I don't like mean-spirited documentaries ("isn't this group weird?") so this was just right. We rented the movie from Amazon Instant Video, here.

Honey Bee Homeschool Unit Schedule and Lesson Plan

Bees are such a fascinating subject. This unit took us all over the place---history, biology, chemistry---and we loved it. I was amazed how many books and resources there were about this kind of specialized topic. I guess honey is kind of trendy right now (urban beekeeping etc.), so that leads to more readily available resources. Yay.

I don't know if I can even choose what my favorite thing was to learn about, but something I had never heard before (it was discovered relatively recently, I guess) is that the queen can actually choose whether she wants to lay a fertilized or an unfertilized egg. She mates with the drones near the beginning of her life, then just stores their sperm in her body (a place called the spermatheca) and opens the "gate" when she wants to let one out to fertilize an egg. The unfertilized eggs become new drones. Isn't that amazing?? (see more here and here)

The way the bees communicate through dancing is really fascinating too, and there are still so many other mysteries about how their bodies work, and how they interact as a community. We learned so many things and yet I feel like we didn't even scratch the surface of all there is to know.

A few general links that don't really fit on any of the other posts for this unit:

We highly recommend this movie (we watched it on Netflix) even though it was written by the insufferable Thomas Friedman and has some factual errors (like that bees die after they sting wasps or hornets---actually, their stingers only come out when they sting mammals). It has lots of cool close-up shots of bees in the hive and in flight.

This site shows an approximation of how bees see the world.

These flower photos are interesting too (although I'm not sure they're as accurate)

This video is great; it shows the life cycle of a yellow jacket by dissecting a yellow jacket nest

This is a fun project: counting bees!

This is a huge packet containing tons of bee-related lesson plans. We used a few pages from this packet, but there are lots of good things we didn't use.

Here is my Pinterest page for the Bee Unit. I've just started doing this, and have found it helpful to use Pinterest to gather ideas, but not ideal---it bothers me that you can't pin PDFs, for example, and some videos. So I can't actually put all my resources in one place. But it is a useful tool.

Our bee bulletin board

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!

Moon Phase Cookies and "Moon Tennis"

We loved doing this! Even Malachi was pretty good at creating each phase of the moon on his cookie with frosting. We took great strides of improvement beyond the original idea by using cookies that are actually GOOD, though: my friend Beth's homemade oreos. We love these! I made everyone tell me which cookie showed which phase, and then they sandwiched each cookie together with its "match" (first quarter with last quarter, waxing gibbous with waning crescent, etc.) before eating them. Yum!

Here's the recipe:

Homemade Oreos

2 packages Devils Food cake mix
4 large eggs
1 1/2 c shortening

Mix all ingredients together. Roll into tiny balls, place on cookie sheet, and bake at 375 for 7-8 minutes. Make sandwich cookies by spreading one cookie with frosting (recipe below), then placing another cookie on top.

Frosting/filling:
1/8 c butter or margarine, softened
1 8-oz. package cream cheese, softened
1 1/2 t vanilla
2 c powdered sugar

Mix all ingredients until smooth.

Saw this idea of "moon tennis" online. It went along with our discussion of what gravity would actually feel like on the moon---the idea being that some things would be easier to do and others would be harder, and that our lack of familiarity with that amount of gravity would make everything just feel . . . weird. Everyone really loved this game but it was WILD. Luckily all the materials are lightweight because there was lots of accidental (we hope) bashing of heads and arms.

Sam and I and the older boys watched this documentary about the Apollo Moon Missions. It was SO interesting. It's composed mainly of interviews with the different astronauts, and it's just fascinating to hear them recount their impressions and experiences. Lots of small, interesting details that you would never really think to wonder about---like if Michael Collins (the astronaut who stayed in orbit while the other two walked on the moon) felt lonely while he waited for the others. ("I would have liked being lonelier! Mission Control was yapping in my ear the whole time!") We loved it.

Planetarium Shows

We visited both our nearby planetariums (planetaria?) during this unit. My brother Kenneth used to give the planetarium shows at BYU and they were always SO excellent. I could listen to Kenneth talk about the stars forever! I'm sorry to say that the current crop of BYU students hardly lives up to his legacy (the girls were reading their parts from a script the night we went, and not reading very well, either), but it's a fun field trip nonetheless. We'll have to go back again when they're doing a different show (the one we saw was showing us constellations in other cultures, which was somewhat interesting but not very useful for those of us still trying to learn landmarks in OUR night sky!).

A visit to the Eyring Science Center is never a waste of time, though. We always enjoy seeing the pendulum, the wave machine, and the other fun exhibits.

This exhibit showed the density of various materials, culminating with a neutron star. It was so heavy we couldn't even lift it!

Another day, we went to the Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake. They have some really fun free exhibits, though the shows are quite expensive. This time, we went specifically to see an IMAX movie Sam's parents recommended to us, called Hubble 3-D. The astronauts who fixed the Hubble Space Telescope brought an IMAX camera with them, and filmed some really amazing footage. I thought even the parts that showed the astronauts suiting up, getting ready for launch, etc., were really fascinating (because it's 3-D, you feel like you are in the room with them!), but the shots from the astronauts' point of view, looking down at the earth as they floated next to the Hubble and worked on it, are mind-blowing. SO cool. There are a lot of great shots taken by the Hubble itself, also. We really loved the movie and felt like it was worth the (rather pricy) ticket.

Babies Unit Resources and Guest Speaker

We had my awesome midwife, Cathy, come over and be a Guest Speaker for us. She brought some of her big Fetal Development charts, and a really cool model of a baby which you can put inside a uterus. It has an umbilical cord and a placenta you can snap it to, and then you put it inside an amniotic sac, then inside the uterus (sweater-like material with turtleneck-like cervix at one end, showing muscle banding on the outside). I wish I had a picture of it! So that was wonderful, and she showed us all her equipment and demonstrated for the children, on me, how it worked---stethoscope, blood pressure monitor, thermometer, urine test strips, Doppler heartbeat monitor, etc. They usually like to watch her work when she comes over for my prenatal visits, but this time they were free to ask ALL their questions and she let them work some of the equipment. They LOVED it.

Cathy also gave them a homework assignment to study the effects of Doppler/Ultrasound on the baby, and we learned many interesting things as we completed that assignment. Lots of conflicting information, which gave us a great opportunity to discuss evaluating the trustworthiness of sources, and how if you want to understand a subject better, you have to read LOTS of viewpoints about it and not just confine your reading to one or two sources (A couple of the more interesting links are here and here if you are interested).

One of my favorite books on childbirth is this one pictured here:

It's one of the only books I've ever found that shows home birth, and certainly the only one that strikes what I think is the right balance between being really weird or new-agey (I've seen a couple of those) and showing birth as a natural, non-scary, non-medical process that the whole family can participate in. The pictures and the tone are peaceful and beautiful.

My absolute favorite Baby book in the whole world, though---and the kids' favorite as well; we probably read this one EVERY DAY of the unit---is "Baby, Come Out!" It's about a baby that is so happy inside her mama that she refuses to come out, in spite of her whole family trying to persuade her. I think I partly love it because it reminds me so much of Junie's birth, but mostly I just love the charming illustrations and the story. It is so sweet and funny. I love it! We have our own copy and I want to buy a few more to give as gifts.

Here is a sweet video (low-res, but we liked it anyway) of baby animals that we watched one day

One day we studied all the infant reflexes. Then of course the children wanted to talk about adult reflexes, so I got out my drumsticks and showed them the knee-jerk reflex (I used to sit in back and practice making my knee jerk when I was bored during band class; I am very good at finding the correct tendon with my drumsticks:)) and they LOVED that. So we watched this video about how it works. A bit technical but we still found it interesting.

We found a few videos showing the infant reflexes (this one was pretty good) but nothing quite as comprehensive as we wanted. When we have the baby we will try to watch them in real life!

There are a million resources for showing fetal development---all those sites that promise to track your pregnancy week-by-week, etc. Here are a couple, but there are others.

This is an interesting video on how ultrasound works

We watched this movie (on DVD) for movie night. Sam and I had seen it before but the children hadn't. It's so cute! I love watching how similar babies are across cultures, even in spite of their totally different circumstances.

A couple more books about pregnancy/childbirth/babies:
This one is quite comprehensive (lots of good pictures; the text is largely too complex for children) and a good reference
We also liked this one (it contained some fun activity ideas too)