Colonial Williamsburg and Home Educator Week

You can't pass up Williamburg at $5 per ticket. We went last fall, and we will be going every time they offer this fantastic program. This time, the children were both dressed in colonial attire, provided by Ahno and her mad sewing skillz.



Here they are hanging out at the well like a bunch of colonial gossipers:



I have a bazillion more pictures, including a group that Sadie took herself, in my Flickr gallery, in the Colonial Williamsburg set.

For other colonial good times, check out Benny's Colonial Williamsburg Pictorial Tour Guide on his blog. Here's a sample:



Yes, he did move on from discussing the horse poop. But, it was a significant influence on his narrative.

The Destruction of Sennacherib

We're studying Mesopotamia right now, so for our poetry memory work, we're going to tackle this poem by Lord Byron:



The Destruction of Sennacherib
by George Gordon, Lord Byron

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass'd,
And the eyes of the sleepers wax'd deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there roll'd not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpets unblown.
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

Here's the down low on Sennacherib, Lord Byron, and the Assyrians.

The Ice Age

Benny is learning about the East, West, and South Paleolithic time period. He blogged about it on his blog today, and drew this picture:



Have you seen Benny's blog?

Salem Massachusetts: City of Witches

The lady at the Nathaniel Hawthorne birthplace said that on Halloween in Salem there will probably be 60,000 people. When Halloween falls on a weekend, there are over 100,000. Salem has embraced its spooky heritage of witches, hangings, hauntings, possessions, and resin statues of horror movie villains. Salem has found its niche.



Salem has also found a way to control the weather! Our week in Massachusetts so far has been sunny and brisk, but during our stay in Salem it was overcast, chill, and in the evening the fog rolled in off the ocean in such a deliberate way that you could actually see tendrils of fog floating up through the old graveyard. Spooky.



Salem is mostly a cute old New England town with narrow streets still laced with cobblestones, little shops and restaurants and those wooden signs with gold letters hanging from cast iron hinges.



But of course, in 1692 and 1693 dozens of women and men were imprisoned as witches, and 19 of them were put to executed. More died in prison and under torture. When you get down to the actual facts of what happened, you find this: Political upheaval in England and local changes in the theocracy created an atmosphere of unrest and instability. Several local children got sick, probably with a disease that we could explain now but they couldn't explain then. Increasing population forced the colonists farther out into the wilderness, making farming more dangerous and stressing people out. People went a little nutty and started blaming every problem in their lives on women, particularly those were were a little isolated, a little different, not so connected to the community core.

The Salem Witch Trials are as good an argument as any you can find for the separation of church and state. Since 1693, all of the accused have been proclaimed innocent, and apologies have been given. So, why does Salem now call itself the Witch City, when the trials were a horrible, embarrassing mistake and an awful blot on our history? Because it looks good on a t-shirt!

It also looks good on a cycling jersey:



Now I will stop pretending that I didn't love Salem, because Dan and I are total Halloween junkies, and having a whole town devoted to pumpkin carving, ghost spotting, drippy red lettering, and pointy hats, was a Halloween junky's delight.

In the old town hall, we watched a reenactment of an actual witch trial, from the transcripts of the accusation of Bridget Bishop. Abigail Hobbs, another convicted witch, was a witness. Benny was very concerned that it was all real, but at the end when we (the grand jury) were asked to vote on whether there was enough evidence to proceed to trial, he voted that there was.





Here's Benny looking solemn outside the house of one of the judges. This is the only actual remaining building that was involved with the witch trials.



On to brighter things!





We ate at Rockafella's, a converted bank. The vault door was open and could be examined at length -- there were lots and lots of gears including a bevel gear and some long thing with teeth on it that Benny said was a worm gear but it wasn't. Since I didn't know what it actually was, I didn't correct him.





The best part of the day for me was not the clam chowdah, but the trip to the original "House of the Seven Gables" and the birthplace of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Here I am by the birthplace:



Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, The House of the Seven Gables, begins like this:

Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.

The inspiration for the house in the novel is a real house in Salem, whose 19th century inhabitants (relatives of his) entertained the young Hawthorne often, and suggested that he write a book about the house as it would have been in its original form. It's since been restored to be more like the book than it actually was, with Hepzibah's store on the street side, and also a hidden staircase that goes up through the chimney. Seeing Hawthorne's house and the "Pyncheon" house was amazing for me. It almost made me cry, for reasons I can't completely articulate. Apparently it also made me forget to take a picture with the mobile phone, so all my pictures of the house are on my camera still. If you click the link, you can see it and read about it. Because of course, it is so completely fascinating!

We walked back to the car through the dark, saw a black cat, bought t-shirts with witches on them, and went home completely happy.

The Boston Freedom Trail is a Harsh Mistress

Once again, I was wearing a wrong kind of shoe. I don't think I will ever learn.

The Boston Freedom Trail is a red trail of bricks that marches you through several miles of downtown Boston, and drags you past all the most important historical sites along the way. Along the way, you see Paul Revere's grave, his house, and the church where he (or someone else, actually) hung those signal lanterns.

Grave:



House:



You see statues of Paul Revere. You look at the X-rays from Paul Revere's last hairline fracture. You observe the tree where Paul Revere once sat and ate a sandwich. Then you gaze upon the balcony where George Washington delivered his famous "As I survey the spot where Paul Revere ate a sandwich" speech.

The Freedom Trail begins at Boston Common, the big city park. The first important historical site is the state house with its glowing dome:



Here's the South Meeting House where the Bostonians had their rabble-rabble-rabble meeting before they marched down to the harbor and hurled the tea into the water. Interesting things about this: The Boston Massacre took place right outside this building, and five people died. During the Siege of Boston, when the British were trapped inside the city, they ripped the pews out of the church, dragged in a bunch of dirt, and turned it into a riding ring. Inside, you can see the spot where George Washington stood and said he was amazed that people who revere their own churches so much could so casually defile ours. Good point.

Benjamin Franklin was born on Milk Street. His birthplace is now a Sir Speedy print shop:



See the bust of Franklin, above the second floor?

Here we are in Quincy Market, having lunch and trying to get the sparrows and pigeons to eat out of Benny's hand:



And here's Sadie! She has been hiding in the stroller this whole time, refusing to let me photograph her. Let me say that every building in Boston has stairs, no one can find the ramps and elevators, and I need a flying stroller. At least the baby is happy.



Gelato in Little Italy:



We deviated from the Freedom Trail and its bossy red bricks so we could make a circuit back to the car, via Beacon Hill. Here's Benny on Charles St. I read a smug little explanation online about Charles Street, that boasted there are no neon signs and no franchises. I guess the original Dunkin' Donuts, Ritz Camera, and 7-Eleven must be on Charles Street then. And the Freedom Trail doesn't even go down it!



Benny found a shoe repair guy doing work on a boot in his little basement workshop -- it was really cool. We looked for simple machines. Benny rapped on the window and I said, "Don't knock on the glass!" You know, because it scares the shoe repair guys! Turns out shoe repair guys aren't puffer fish -- he smiled and waved at Benny.



Here's Benny at the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health. I have no caption for this:



They were filming a movie on the lagoon side of Boston Common. I peered and peered and peered to try and figure out who the stars were... WELL! We researched it when we got back to the condo. The blonde I saw was Kate Hudson and the Ben Afflecky looking person I saw was Dane Cook! And the movie was Bachelor #2. Neat! I saw a chicklit movie getting filmed! I'm totally almost famous now!

Sadie tried to sneak onto the movie set, disguised as a stroller, but they busted her. DARN. So close.



So, that was our four mile hike around the city of Boston. Two many burial grounds for Benny, and too many stairs for me. I failed to take a picture of Benny making an angry, outraged face at the plaque in the sidewalk on the site of America's first public school. His favorite thing was the huge dry fountain outside the old North Church, which he said was a racetrack, and in which he took many laps. Sadie's favorite was the duck that chased her in Boston Common. My favorite was the South Meeting House -- RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE!!!!!

Colonial Williamsburg in Inappropriate Shoes

Colonial Williamsburg has an amazing program for homeschoolers, three times a year. During "Home Educators Week" homeschooling kids and parents can get tickets for $5 each that normally cost a whole lot more than that. I meant to take the kids last spring, but Ahno was working on colonial outfits for them, and she hadn't finished Benny's. This time around, she had still not finished Benny's, but she sent me on a mission to find a really great three-cornered hat to go with it when it's done, and inspire her to get it off the table and onto the hanger. So we went.

And we found one:



While we were there, since apparently there is more to history than fashion (or whatever), we decided to learn some things. I hadn't prepared the children for the experience, we had not read about the American Revolution or made baskets or turned geese on a spit or anything, and the truth is that I have only a loose grasp on history myself. I'm expecting myself to learn a lot as I help Benny learn about it. That is my expectation. At this point, though, I am no natural expert, unless I've recently spent some time in a book on the subject. So I put Benny in charge of directions:



When you put a seven year old boy with endless energy in charge of a map, he will want to visit locations with maximum distance from each other. That is to say, if you're at one end of Williamsburg, you'll need to next go to the other end, and then back to the first end, and back to the other end. Also, if you put a seven year old boy in charge of directions, you will spend a lot of time looking at various colonial animals.



We lucked out at the brickyard, and arrived just as another group was leaving. So Benny got a private lesson in making bricks, which was awesome. They build a kiln each year by stacking up last year's bricks into an oven, with this year's raw bricks inside, then plastering mud all over it, and lighting fires underneath for a week. Benny was able to answer a lot of questions about, for example, why these three bricks, all baked at the same time for the same duration in the kiln, came out three different colors? Answer: Distance from the actual fire. I thought that was pretty astute. He and the brickman were eye to eye on many issues, and Benny learned the material so well that he went ahead and pompously explained it to the next kid to arrive, raising a little ire. Here he is getting his lesson:



Sadie on one of the walkways at the Governor's Palace:



Benny getting to be a juror at the courtroom in the capitol building:



This was cool -- we have been studying about wind power and we got to see a post style windmill, with a wheel sticking out from it so that the miller could turn the whole thing into the wind if the wind changed direction. This was one of those cool moments where Benny spent a few minutes kindly instructing me on the way windmills are operated. It also dovetailed nicely with our gears discussions, related to the Lego League topic of the week.



Here are the children doing some colonial laundry:



Sadie's pigtails, getting some instruction:



I'm very glad we went. I hadn't been to Colonial Williamsburg since I was about Sadie's age myself. We will definitely be back for the next homeschool week, and the next. At that price, anyone in driving distance would be foolish to stay home. Benny had a blast, and Sadie enjoyed herself too, from the cellar of the Shields Tavern to the jail cell where they held Blackbeard's pirate crew before hanging them (yes, we locked Benny in, yes, he was thrilled and talked about it all the way home). I will also say that the place was crawling with some of the most mannerly, thoughtful, lovely little children. I don't think it was just a homeschool thing -- I made the conclusion that children whose parents would drag them through Williamsburg are just a cut above.

Of course, in this case, it was me getting dragged. :) Next time I'm wearing my colonial tennis shoes.



Edit: Visit this awesome photo album from another homeschool family that visited Williamsburg at the same time we did, and miraculously took incredibly better pictures!