Little House in the Big Woods: Chapter 2

Chapter 2:

Chapter two is only twenty pages long and yet it kept us learning and researching, making crafts and creating in the kitchen all week long! We've had great fun.

This week in our Prairie time we read how Ma allowed the girls to use her thimble and make drawings on their frosted windows. We don't have frosted winters in September, so I gave them blue construction paper, white paint and my thimble.

We read all about Laura and Mary's chores. They made their beds every morning and helped Ma clean and dry the breakfast dishes.  Ma also had a special chore for each day:

"Wash on Monday,

Iron on Tuesday,

Mend on Wednesday,

Churn on Thursday,

Clean on Friday,

Bake on Saturday,

Rest on Sunday."

We discussed our daily and weekly jobs and compared them to Laura's.
The templates I got from HomeSchoolShare

(This was my five-year-old's list of chores).

Next we read how Ma and the girls churned the milk into butter.

We made butter too! 

Each child had their own butter container to "churn." 

We wrote about it and entitled it, "I Made Butter!"

This is a little book listing all the steps Laura took in order to make butter.

(We discovered that it was more difficult to make butter in Laura's day then ours!)

Now, it says that when all their work was done that Ma allowed the girls to play with their paper dolls- so, when we were finished with all our work, I let them play with paper dolls too!

 Here's the paper 'little house"- I had it laminated.

Then we sat down and cut out Pa, Ma, and Laura paper dolls!

And there were times when all the work was done, that Laura and Mary played with their real dolls. Laura had a corn-cob doll, but we made corn-husk dolls and played with them!

At the end of the day, when Pa came home at night from trapping, he would play the fiddle. I rented this CD from the local library and as my children worked on their next project for their Lapbook, we listened to fiddle music.

The little guys made Pa's fiddle and my older children wrote a reflection or journal entry comparing how Laura felt when her Pa played the fiddle as to how they feel when their daddy plays the guitar.

The chapter ends with Pa telling a story about how a panther chased his grandfather. 

We checked out books on wild cats, researched, and then wrote up all we discovered on the panther.

 I can not believe how much the children and I are learning! It feels like with every word Laura Ingals Wilder writes there is something new for the children to engage in. I am so grateful for the time together to learn so much!