Scrapbooking: History

Our daughter's birthday is approaching, so I've been playing catchup on layouts for her birthday scrapbook.  

Since beginning the homeschooling journey, I have fallen in love with history all over again.  One of my favorite things to do with the kids is to teach them history by reading either true stories from different time periods or historical fiction.  The mother-daughter American Girl book club has been especially memorable for my daughter and me.  

This past month, our book club studied Meet Josefina.  This book is about a ranchero family living in New Mexico (as we know that area today) during the early settlement period.  Our daughter and another book club attendee usually try to dress in period costumes appropriate for the book of study.  This time, the other girl wore a lovely traditional Latino blouse for the occasion, while my daughter wore her pink leather cowgirl boots and hat which weren't all that appropriate for the time period but at least reflected southwestern ranch life.

We enjoyed tacos for dinner and roasted marshmallows to make Smores for dessert.  Since Josefina's grandfather spent six months out of each year traveling to Mexico to trade goods for the family, the girls brought trinkets from home to exchange at our own book club swap meet.  Josefina was fascinated by her aunt's piano, so each girl in attendance took turns playing songs for the group.  This mini recital provided just the motivation I had been praying that I daughter would find to persevere in her piano practice.  The hosts led the girls in a fabulous history and geography lesson and facilitated a lively discussion.

Our daughter's school teacher also enjoys creating fun experiences to help the students remember and better understand historical time periods.  Recently, during their study of Victorian England, she invited each of the students to "High Tea".  All the students wore their best Victorian (or dressy) attire for tea with the future grandmother of England.  After trying on a wide assortment of period costumes, our daughter decided that she would rather just wear a simple white dress (which happens to be the same dress our niece wore as the flower girl in our wedding) with a shawl that was hand-woven by the group we sponsor through World Vision.

Special thanks to her teacher (upper left corner) for providing 3 of these photos.

On February 2, our daughter learned about the history of Groundhog Day.  I joked about not caring whether the groundhog sees his shadow or not since winter has been defined by mild, pleasant, spring-like weather this year.  On Groundhog Day, the temperature climbed into the low 70s.  The groundhog did see his shadow in Punxsutawney, PA, but when Georgy the Groundhog visited our daughter's school on Groundhog Day, he was too distracted by the crowd of school children staring him down to even notice his shadow when he crawled out of his hole.