More Colonial Crafts

This week we made some more colonial crafts from the book Colonial Kids.

We talked about how colonists wove cloth out of wool. In the book, it suggested making your own loom from cardboard, but I just cheated and bought the kids' craft one at Walmart. It was supposed to make a pot holder, but I couldn't understand the instructions on how to take it off the loom. Once I finished tying it up, it looked more like a coaster :)
We made some quill pens out of some craft feathers and ink. The kids enjoyed doing this, but found out that it was kind of hard. We also learned that students sat on long wooden benches at school...similar to what we have at our school table. Another thing that students used were hornbooks...a wooden paddle with a thin piece of animal horn fastened to it. A student's lesson was placed under the piece of horn to protect it. The student would wear it around his neck and use it as a study table since they only sat at benches. Some teachers were known to use the hornbook to thump the students on the head when they weren't paying attention...sounded like a good idea to me...especially for Cameron ;) Notice the lesson I wrote for them...maybe they should wear these everyday?
Here's an example of a hornbook

There were practically no libraries during the colonial times so people borrowed and lent books out. Since books were important and scarce, people affixed bookplates to their books to show ownership. Some had funny messages on them...my favorite example was
"This book is one thing, my fist's another,
if you touch the one, you'll feel the other."
We made our own bookplates out of label computer paper. (Notice Miriam is writing her own name now, but wants to put hearts to dots her i's.)