Revolutionary War Unit Food

Another Liberty Tea Party—with various herbal teas, and a delicious "colonial" pound cake!

Here is the recipe for the pound cake. Since I am finding that many of these links end up broken after several years, and I LIKE this pound cake recipe, I will reproduce it here (it's already in my recipe book):

1 cup butter
3 cups sugar
1 cup sour cream
1⁄2 teaspoon baking soda
3 cups all-purpose flour
6 large eggs
1 -2 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat the oven to 325.
Cream butter and sugar together with your heavy-duty mixer.
Add the sour cream and mix thoroughly.
Sift baking soda and flour together.
Add the flour to the creamed mixture, alternating with one egg at a time (about 1/2 cup of flour each time).
Mix well after each addition.
Add the vanilla and mix well.
Spoon the mixture into a well greased and floured 10 inch tube or bundt pan.
Bake for 1 hour and 20 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in cake tests COMPLETELY clean.
Let cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 15 minutes.
Invert cake on wire rack, removing from pan and let cool completely.

Things to mention while making the cake:

• Pound cakes became popular in the 1700's.

• Why might they be called pound cakes? Original recipe: 1 pound cake flour (3-1/2 cups), 1 pound butter (2 cups), 1 pound sugar (2-1/4 cups), & 1 pound eggs (9 large).

• We have changed the recipe because we would find this cake dense and not as tasty.

• To make less dense, we add a leavener, which helps things rise. Here we're using baking soda.

• This would have been a very special treat because it used sugar instead of molasses and sugar was very expensive.

We also made Indian Pudding (or Hasty Pudding) one day, which you can find the recipe for here or here. This time we made it in the Instant Pot, which is a great way to cook cheesecakes or puddings. You just wrap the dish securely in foil to keep the water out. Add 1 cup of water to the pot and place the wrapped dish on top of the trivet. Cook on the Manual setting for 30-45 minutes.

And another day, we tried making Maple Cream candy. I didn't love it, but maybe we didn't make it quite right? Anyway the children were happy enough to eat it. Instructions here.

Last time we did this unit, we read a book that told about "Thomas Jefferson's Vanilla Ice Cream." We didn't have that book this time, but we did find the same recipe from Thomas Jefferson on the Monticello website. It's even in his own handwriting! So cool! It made good ice cream, too. We thought it was pretty similar to our usual vanilla bean ice cream, if maybe slightly less sweet.

Here are some other colonial recipes (or "receipts") we had fun looking at, too. 

We found this list of table manners for colonial children (these were written by George Washington) and thought they were pretty great:

“Never sit down at the table till asked, and after the blessing. Ask for nothing; tarry till it be offered thee. Speak not. Bite not thy bread but break it. Take salt only with a clean knife. Dip not the meat in the same. Hold not thy knife upright but sloping, and lay it down at right hand of plate with blade on plate. Look not earnestly at any other that is eating. When moderately satisfied leave the table. Sing not, hum not, wriggle not. Spit no where in the room but in the corner..."

"Eat not too fast nor the Greedy Behavior. Eat not vastly but moderately. Make not a noise with thy Tongue, Mouth, Lips, or Breath in Thy Eating and Drinking. Smell not of thy Meat; nor put it to Thy Nose; turn it not the other side upward on Thy Plate."

Revolutionary War Unit Study (II)

Dramatic scene showing George Washington being attacked by a British soldier, with Martha looking on in horror!

This is our second time around learning about the Revolutionary War. (Here are all my posts about the first unit.) We did some of the same activities and read a few of the same books, but found a lot of new books at the library too! And it's interesting how the current crop of students influences the activities I choose, or how we do them.

It was also fun this time because the children's cousins in California were studying the Revolutionary War in their homeschool around the same time, so we shared activities and ideas. I wish we lived closer so we could've done some things actually together, but it was kind of cool just knowing that they were learning and doing some of the same things as us!

Here's the pinterest page from our previous Revolutionary War Unit, in 2014.

A video about Colonial Williamsburg

A video overview of the Thirteen Colonies

A fun game about taxation (with M&Ms) https://betterlesson.com/lesson/575437/the-king-s-taxation-m-m-s

Follow-up video here: https://youngteacherlove.com/role-playing-with-american-revolution/

Activities we did with food

Activities about Colonial Clothing

Other Revolutionary War Activities

Animal Crafts

Malachi (my oldest student this year…7th grade) had a group math and chemistry class once a week, so we used the days he was gone as our craft days. The other children love cutting, coloring, pasting…all those types of activities…and Malachi finds them somewhat beneath him (ha!), so this worked out perfectly. He did join us for a few of these, though!

This frog life cycle craft was pretty fun, though it was mostly just cutting and gluing. (Good practice for Teddy, not quite as fun for the older girls.) https://www.easypeasyandfun.com/3d-frog-life-cycle-craft/ There were lots of cute ideas for similar crafts, such as this one:

from this blog here.

This chameleon painting activity was quite fun. You paint the plate with swirling colors, then put a cut-out chameleon on top and turn the plate to change his colors. The kids loved it. Instructions are here:

http://tippytoecrafts.blogspot.com/2012/11/colorful-chameleons.html

We made these cards near Christmastime and used them for some of our Light the World service…penguins are so cute for winter! Also they're Daisy's favorite animal. I chose mostly crafts that had to do with the children's favorites. You don't really even need a template for this card (it's just the basic "beak" or "mouth" pop-up) but here is one: https://www.easypeasyandfun.com/penguin-pop-up-card-template/

Malachi made an owl instead

These page-corner bookmarks are easy and fun to make. We made ours into pigs, but you can really make them into any animal (Teddy made a bunny). Here's a basic tutorial:  

https://www.easypeasyandfun.com/pig-corner-bookmarks/

The older children are pretty good at sewing simple projects. This was a fun one. We made these little owl handwarmers for all the kids in Sam's and my church class, too (we teach the 9-10 year olds). You fill them with rice and then put them in the microwave for a few seconds to warm them up. You can find some instructions here https://craftyourhappiness.com/2014/12/22/quick-owl-hand-warmers/. If you use fleece, you don't need to finish the seams or turn them inside out or anything.

We made a few penguins too!

This craft was really fun because a.) my kids LOVE using Sharpies, which are usually forbidden, and b.) it's just fun to color on plastic sheet protectors! And the results were really pretty.

I had a bunch of animal stickers, so this was just a classification activity. Stickers are always fun.

One night for Family Night we played a game where everyone had to draw a picture making a case for which animal is "the best animal." It was cute to see what everyone came up with.

Cute and…weird. (Seb.)

Love Junie's pigs! Good reasoning too. Snuggly babies DO qualify animals for greatness!

Teddy's cute cute bunnies.

The written word is Malachi's forte

I love the penguin refusing the waiter's food :)

But I think Goldie's might have been the best. Her reasons that elephants are the best animal?

• Strongest anaml

• Biggist land anaml

• Eats the most food I know.

• Dusint run away

• Dus not leve babyes

• Its the gentlest anaml

• Can paint

• Ar not carnarvors

Reading all that, can anyone disagree? I think not.

Animal Kingdom Homeschool Unit

Click to enlarge and make this look less blurry!

 

This was a long unit! And very wide-ranging! We have talked about a lot of specific animals before, and some larger groups:

bear

bird unit

birds of prey

bunny

elephant

honeybee

insect

monkeys and apes

penguin

…but this was a little different because we were able to cover taxonomy and learn some organizing principles about the various groups. It was kind of nice to pull way out and do that overview to get the big picture. 

Here is a lesson plan about classifying animals.

Due to remarkably good planning (hee hee) we were talking about classification soon after Halloween, which naturally led us to do a classification activity with the children's Halloween candy. They saw that there are many useful ways of dividing up, sorting, and labeling the same items!

We divided this unit up into Invertebrates, Reptiles, Amphibians, Fish, Birds, and Mammals. We also covered Habitats, Predators and Prey/Food Webs, Adaptations, Life Cycles, and Animal Families.

We loved this movie called Octopus: Making Contact (and octopuses are our new favorite animal!)  

I also read this book The Soul of an Octopus (super interesting), and Sam and I watched and really liked this movie (My Octopus Teacher) even though it looked at first like it would be very boring :)

LOTS of fun books available for this unit…you really could fill up a whole year! And we did a lot of crafts too, which I will link to in a separate post.