Home Ed Literature Fair

Last week was the final project fair of the academic year and it was literature themed.

These are project fairs that I have organized throughout the academic year. They are good fun, but also a little tiring to run as it’s quite intense getting around all the presentations and giving the children the opportunity to speak about their projects. But they are very enjoyable and demonstrate the wide variety of interests and approaches in the community.

The idea is that the children produce a project with a link to literature. This time around nearly all the children had studied a book and shared about it. At a previous literature we have had author studies as well as technical studies such as poetry techniques etc. As long as there is a link to literature we are good!

Our Project

I thought we would use the Post from the Past letter all about Laura Ingalls Wilder as the basis of our project and we spent a couple of weeks reading aloud her book, Little House on the Prairie. Laura Ingalls Wilder wasn’t a person I was familiar with prior to the letter arriving and I would never have picked up one of her books to read. We have, since finishing the project, bought three more of the books in the series to share.

Our project was split into two parts. The first part was a small study about Laura Ingalls Wilder and the time she was alive. The second part was about the book itself. We really enjoyed working on the project in this way and we covered much more than we put on our literature fair display.

Learning about Laura Ingalls Wilder

We used the Post from the Past letter as the basis of our learning about Laura and we also read a little more about her from various sources on the internet. We talked a lot about attitudes to the Native Americans and how much change she would have seen in her life. Em wrote a short fact file about her for the display and we looked at creating a timeline of the key parts of her and her family’s life.

We also made some little paper dolls to display of the family and we talked about the style of clothing and how it was practical for their day-to-day lives, but perhaps not something the children would want to wear!

Using the Books

I made an error in assuming that Little House on the Prairie was the first book in the series so we bought that to read and share. Ideally, I should have started with Little House in the Big Woods.

Using the book, we mapped where the family traveled from and how many states they traveled through. Daniel then drew the state flags for each of those states and we positioned them next to a map.

We really liked the descriptive nature of Laura’s writing and it really did take us back into that period of time. One of the things to note, however, is the way that Native Americans are referred to. The books is very much of its time and the language used reflects that. I did alter some of the words as I read aloud and it was a useful discussion with the children about how atitudes have change over time. We also looked at how the ‘Indians’ and the Ingalls-Wilder’s were similar which showed that both groups were simply wanting to live on the land and provide protection for their families. The book speaks a lot from the point of view of the family so we dicussed why the ‘Indians’ might be fearful of them. I plan to look at this in more depth in the autumn term (to tie in with Thanksgiving) and the Squanto letter would be a good addition to this study too.

We talked a lot about the nature around Laura and Mary and the children drew some pictures of the animals they read about in the book.

Crafts

We also completed some crafts alongside the book. We made a paper wagon, had a go at making some small quilts. We did this by hand which proved trickier than using the sewing maehine! The children didn’t enjoy this craft that much! We also had a go at making butter using cream. This was a really good way to demonstrate how much more convenient our lives are. They really enjoyed this but commented that it took way too long! We also made paper star garlads using brown paper packaginng.

I had inteded to make some ink with them and use a feather as a pen, but I ran out of time to source the items for the ink and didn’t find any suitable feathers that were sturdy enough so I cheated and bought an ink quill pen. The children used this to write the information on their display boards which they did on brown paper packaging in a bid to being as authentic as possible to their thrifty lives.

We really enjoyed this study adn are thankful that our Post from the Past letter let us into a world we would not have otherwise have looked at. We are now reading the other books in the series and will revisit some of the points in relation to their lives with the Native Americans when we study that in the autumn time.