Awesome American History: 1912-1919

This covered Harry Houdini, The Great Molasses Flood, and World War I.  In a lovely coincidence, this meant that we were covering WWI during Veteran's Day!  It was pages 215-224 in The American Story by Jennifer Armstrong.

For WWI, we did a poppy picture as our art project.  We talked about why poppies came to represent the fallen soldiers of WWI, and I read In Flanders Fields to them.

When I was a child, living on an Army base, WWI veterans used to sell paper poppies around Veteran's Day.  I called up my Dad to ask if I was remembering correctly - he and my mom always bought at least one and put it on the car viser.

Yes, indeed! The WWI veterans are gone now, but up in NJ, WWII (and later) veterans still sell poppies around Veteran's Day!

 For our active activity, we favored Harry Houdini by tying all the kids up and throwing them in the closet to see if they could escape.

Then all the moms had a nice quiet chat over coffee while eating all the kids' snacks.

Well, that was my idea, anyway.  What we actually did was all try to escape bamboo finger traps, which was almost as fun.

 And Klenda made molasses ginger cookies for our snack, referencing the Great Molasses Flood.  Yum!