Jamestown

Our homeschool co-op is studying Virginia history this year. Since the co-op mothers also wanted to give our children a chance to improve their writing and speaking skills, we set things up a little differently this year. Rather than having one of the mothers teach the class, we are having the older children (11 and up) take turns giving a presentation to both their class and the younger class.

This Friday it was my 11 year old son's turn and his topic was Jamestown. He is the youngest in the class, and I have not had him do a lot of formal writing yet, so he needed my help to prepare his speech. While I was gathering information for him on the internet, I came across some great websites.

The most informative was The Jamestown Settlement & Yorktown Victory Center Visitor's Site. My son and I enjoyed watching The Jamestown Chronicals, a series of short video biographies about some of the people related to the settlement of Jamestown. They also have some nice educational downloads. The National Parks Service site for Historic Jamestowne also looked interesting, although I didn't take the time to explore it.

We were also looking for some ideas to make his presentation more interesting. Since he was planning to show off the model of Jamestown that he had built using our Revolutionary War Time Traveler's CD, we thought it would be fun to have the older students make their own forts using graham crackers. We ended up splitting the class into two groups and having each group build a fort.

But the idea of passing out cookies, pretzels, and frosting to twenty-one children between the ages of 5 and 10 was a bit frightening. So I came up with a craft for the little ones based on the diet of the Jamestown settlers during the winter of 1609-1610, also known as the "Starving Time."

The colony had suffered many setbacks, but finally began to prosper under the strict leadership of Captain John Smith. Most of the original colonists had come to America in search of wealth and refused to help grow food or build shelters. Smith insisted that if a man didn't work, he shouldn't eat. But after Smith was injured in a gunpowder accident and returned to England, the colonists lost all concern for growing food.  There wasn't much set aside for winter, and relations with the native tribes had gotten hostile that they were afraid to leave the fort to look for food. They were forced to eat whatever they could find including dogs, cats, horses, snakes, and old shoes. Some of them even dug up bodies to eat, and one man man was discovered to have murdered his wife and was eating her!

Jamestown During The Starving Time craft

I uploaded the file for this craft to Homeschool Launch, but I made the clipart a little bit bigger. Also, if you are studying Virginia history and would like to create a lapbook, The Fairfax County Public Schools has a site called Engaging Students with Foldables where you can download minibooks which line up with the Virginia SOL's.