This week I started teaching an Oregon Trail unit to our home school co-op. I'm stoked. This is my favorite unit study for history. We are doing an Oregon Trail simulation where the children all have imaginary wagons and families to travel with. They are keeping 'journals' to record their journey; these will be turned into story books at the end of the semester. This week they all bought supplies from my general store to outfit their wagons and today they will leave Independance, Missouri to begin their journey. Along the trail there are differenct scenarios they encounter and they have to figure out what they will do (for example, the water is contaminated with larvae....what will they do about that? Will they trade with this Native American tribe or not?) Nathan pointed out that it's basically an RPG like Dungeons and Dragons....except instead of being elves, they are pioneers....and instead of fighting trolls, they're trading with Native Americans. It doesn't sound as gripping somehow.
I wore my historical reenactment dress from our days of volunteering at the Pioneer Farms museum. (Can I just say here that I think corsets were never intended for breast-feeding mamas? Yikees.) The kids were delighted. (I was happy for an excuse to wear the darn dress. It took forever to make, so by golly, I'm going to wear it any chance I get!)
Earlier this week my house was so cluttered. I get so tired of clutter....it seems to suck the energy out of my body in a parasitcal way I can't control until the clutter is annihilated. I told the children we were going to clean for 2 hours. I wrote every chore I could think of on slips of paper, then we dividing into teams. Each team drew out 15 slips of paper to tackle, then we raced to see which team could finish first. They did it without any whining!
Okay, before you hand me the mother-of-the-year award (which I would promptly misplace anyway) I should confess I bribed them. We played for high stakes this week with full sized Snickers bars awarded to the winning team. It was a very close finish after hours of mopping, scrubbing, sweeping, and vacuuming. It actually ended up being a tie, so the consolation prizes were abolished and the kids cut the Snickers bars into equal portions to share. They were delighted (we don't usually have junk food in the house, so it's a big deal to get a candy bar). I'm just happy my house is clean.
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