Understanding and Collecting Rocks and Fossils by Martyn Bramwell, 1983.
This book is part of a series of beginning hobby guides for kids. It explains how to collect and study rocks and fossils and some of the deeper aspects of geology. The book emphasizes that studying geology helps us to understand the story of the Earth and the forces that have shaped our landscapes and formed the rocks and minerals we use. All through the book, there are suggested activities and experiments for readers, marked with the symbol of a red magnifying hand-lens.
The book explains some the large geological forces, like how the continents move and the plates that make up the Earth’s crust shift. Then, it explains the different types of rocks, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic, with examples of each type.
One of the sections I found particularly interesting is the one that explains about how to identify different minerals and what they’re used for. The activity on that page explains how to identify a mineral based on a series of factors, like whether or not it’s magnetic, the color of a streak it might leave when scraped against tile, and its hardness, which you can test by seeing what implement will scratch it.
I also liked the section about crystals and gemstones. There are instructions for growing your own crystals.
The section about fossils explains how to collect fossils, clean them, make plaster molds of them, and identify what organisms made the fossils. The book explains how fossils are made and had a timeline of past eras on Earth and the creatures that existed in each era.
The last section of the book explains the types of work that geologists do and the types of geological surveys they carry out to predict earthquakes and tsunamis and finding useful deposits of ore, minerals, oil, and natural gas.
There’s quite a lot of information to take in. Even though this is a pretty beginner guide to rock collecting and geology, I would say that the book would be better suited to older children than younger ones.
This was my second favorite book about outer space as a kid! It would have been the first favorite, but my first favorite had glow-in-the-dark pictures, and this one doesn’t. I bought them at the same time at a school book fair, but the one with the glow-in-the-dark pictures definitely caught my attention first. This book does, however, have pictures of the planets taken by the Voyager 2 space probe.
The beginning of the book explains a little about the solar system and its place in the galaxy and the Voyager 2 probe.
Then, it takes readers on a journey through the solar system, beginning with the sun at the center of the solar system and moving outward, planet by planet. The page about each planet explains the origin of the planet’s name in Roman mythology and gives facts about the planet, such as its size, distance from the sun, and rotation and orbit periods.
The page about Earth specifically mentions, “The Earth will only support life as long as we are careful to maintain its special conditions. If people continue to pollute the environment, the delicate balance of our planet may be destroyed forever.” Books, movies, tv shows, and teachers in public school gave us environmental messages very early in life when I was young in the 1980s and 1990s.
The book ends with Pluto as the ninth planet, which is what we were taught as kids in the early 1990s. There is no mention of “dwarf planets” or the Kuiper Belt because the book was published in 1990 and scientists didn’t find definite evidence of Kuiper Belt objects until 1992.
Discover the Night Sky by Chris Madsen and Michele Claiborne, 1989.
I bought this book at a school book fair when I was a kid, and it was my favorite book about the stars and outer space because it has glow-in-the-dark pictures. As a child, I loved anything that was glow-in-the-dark. Actually, I still do.
Every page in the book is designed to be interactive. There are pages that talk about different aspects of outer space, but the pages with the glow-in-the-dark pictures want you to guess what’s in the picture based on descriptions of it. Then, you’re supposed to turn off the light and look at the glowing picture to see what it is. You can see the what the glow-in-the-dark picture is without turning off the lights if you tilt the book and look at it at an angle or use a black light (like I did to take the pictures), but it is more fun if you really do look at it while it’s glowing in the dark. (Like other glow-in-the-dark toys, it glows better if the page has been in the light first to charge it.)
The pages after each glow-in-the-dark page have facts about the object in the glow-in-the-dark picture and an experiment for readers to do. The experiments help demonstrate the nature of the moon, stars, and planets, like what causes the phases of the moon, what causes seasons on Earth, and why you don’t see the stars during the day, even though they’re still there.
The information in the book is still factually correct, although it shows Pluto as being the last planet of the solar system. (Since people still quibble about this, I don’t consider it a big issue.) It isn’t a bad introduction to outer space for young children. The last page in the book is about the Voyager 2 space probe. Its primary mission ended around the time the book was first published, but we have contact with the space probe today (as of early 2021).
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. The online version of the book doesn’t fully do it justice because you can’t take advantage of the glow-in-the-dark feature, but you can still read the text and see the experiment pages.
Addy’s Cook Book by Rebecca Sample Bernstein, Terri Braun, Tamara England, and Jodi Evert, 1994.
This cook book is one of the activity books that was written to accompany the Addy series that is part of the American Girls franchise. The American Girls books were written to help teach American history (as well as sell the accompanying dolls and accessories), so this book has recipes of the type that people would have eaten during the American Civil War, when the character of Addy lived, and some historical information.
The book begins with sections of historical information about African Americans, kitchens, and table settings in the 1860s. It describes the lives of slaves and explains how they were given basic rations of food which they could supplement and extend by producing or gathering some food of their own, such as vegetables they grew or fish they caught themselves. When they managed to escape from slavery, they had to depend on help from others, such as churches or abolitionists, until they became established in their new lives. When they were able, many of them provided help to others who were in the same position. (This was a topic covered in the Addy books.)
The types of kitchens they used depended on where they were living. As slaves, Civil War era African Americans would do their cooking in small fireplaces attached to the small cabins where they lived. Because they needed the fire for cooking, they kept it burning all the time, even in hot weather. Free African Americans had more options. Depending on their living arrangements, they might have a stove for their cooking, or if they lived in a boarding house, they might be provided with meals as part of their boarding, paid for along with the rent on their rooms.
The recipes in the book are divided into three sections: breakfast, dinner, and favorite foods. There is a section with some general cooking tips, but there are other cooking tips and pieces of historical information included along with the recipes. Some information that I found particularly useful explains why some historical recipes can be confusing to read. Because some people were using cooking fires and some were using stoves, 19th century recipes can have vague-sounding instructions like “fry until golden brown” instead of specific cooking times and temperatures. It was also common for people to cook favorite dishes from memory instead of following written recipes. People learned to cook from their elders, and they just continued doing what parents and grandparents always did when they cooked. The book doesn’t mention it, but this style of cooking also continued into the 20th century, so even when people wrote down recipes, they might seem vague or incomplete to modern readers. It was like that with recipes that my grandmother and great-grandmother wrote down, too. They were accustomed to making certain recipes mostly from memory, and they didn’t feel obligated to write down every little step, assuming that anyone who read it would already know how to make that kind of dish and would just need a few reminders about amounts. Fortunately, the recipes in this book are all written with detailed, modern instructions and include cooking times and oven temperatures.
The book explains that poor people during the Civil War didn’t usually have much for breakfast because they had to rise early and get to work. Most mornings, they might have some leftovers from the previous night or some simple hot foods, like buttermilk biscuits and hominy grits, a traditional Southern breakfast food made from corn (my grandmother said that she had it when she was growing up on a farm in Indiana, too). As a special treat, they might have scrambled eggs or sausage and gravy.
The dinner section includes main dishes, like fried fish, and side dishes, like hush puppies. A particular recipe that gets extra attention is Hoppin’ John, a rice dish with black-eyed peas and bacon. Hoppin’ John is special because it’s a dish traditionally served at New Year’s Day.
The section of favorite foods include chicken shortcake, a few other side dishes, and a few special treats, including peach cobbler and shortbread. I’ve tried the shortbread recipe, and I like it. It’s easy to make and includes only a few ingredients, and it’s really good. It does contain a lot of butter, so it’s just an occasional treat.
The book ends with a section of advice for planning an Emancipation party. It explains how people celebrated when the Emancipation Proclamation was read publicly on December 31, 1862, having been transmitted to communities by telegraph. Children played games like Novel Writers (which is a story-writing game similar to Consequences) and Blindman’s Buff. The book also describes the origins of Juneteenth – slaves in Texas were freed on June 19th, 1865, about two and half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
This cookbook was designed not only for children but includes real children making their favorite recipes, sometimes by themselves and sometimes with the help of their parents. The author, Jill Krementz, was also a photographer, and she photographed the children as they cooked. (Another interesting fact is that Jill Krementz was also married to Kurt Vonnegut, until his death. It’s not directly related to this book at all, just a fun fact.)
The recipes in the book aren’t arranged in any particular order, going back and forth between main dishes and desserts of various kinds. Some of the children included recipes for entire meals that included both main dishes and a dessert.
The children themselves are a range of ages from six to sixteen. The older children tend to make more complex dishes or meals, and the younger ones tend to make simpler ones, although even the younger children can make complex dishes with the help of their parents or grandparents. One girl, Michele, has a father who is a professional chef, and she says that it’s her ambition to be a chef, too. She and her father are shown making spaghetti together in the kitchen of his restaurant.
The children all seem to live in or around New York City, where the author lived, and they are from a variety of backgrounds. There are two girls who mention that they are Jewish, including the girl who makes matzo ball soup with her grandmother. There are also two black girls, and one boy with Greek ancestry. Not all of the children have obvious backgrounds like this, but I thought it was interesting where it was noticeable. I think that having a variety of children with different ages and backgrounds was a good idea because it could help many young readers to identify with different types of children.
I also liked the fact that there were both boys and girls cooking their favorite recipes. Not only did Michele cook a recipe with her father, but there are other fathers in the book, helping with the cooking, too. One of the boys makes dog biscuits for his dog with his father, and he comments, “I think men should cook the same as girls.” It’s nice to see cooking characterized as something that anyone can enjoy doing, both men and women, as well as children of different ages.
One of the cutest recipes is one for making loaves of bread shaped like teddy bears.
One of my favorite recipes was the one for pumpkin pie. I’ve made pumpkin pie from a whole pumpkin like this before, and it’s a lot of work, but it’s fun! The girl making the pie also roasts the pumpkin seeds.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
Kids Cooking: A Very Slightly Messy Manual by the editors of Klutz Press, 1987.
This book is part of the classic children’s hobby and activity series from Klutz Press. Originally, this book came with a set of plastic measuring spoons, which was attached to the book at the hole in the upper left corner.
The recipes in the cookbook are listed in categories by the type of meal: breakfasts, lunches and snacks, dinners and salads, and desserts. There is also a section of recipes for non-edible things, like play dough and finger paint.
The food recipes are fairly simple, but not the overly-simple, boring recipes that I’ve seen in some children’s books, like how to make a peanut butter sandwich.
Kids can make these recipes, but they’re not for little kids who are still at the level of learning to make their own basic sandwiches. They do involve things like using stoves and ovens and chopping ingredients with a sharp knife. It’s common in the book to include “grown-up assistant with knife” under the list of ingredients and tools needed for recipes.
Some of the recipes in the book include multiple ways to cook something, variations on popular foods or different ways of seasoning a dish. For example, the breakfast section explains different ways to cook eggs, including scrambled eggs, fried eggs, soft or hard boiled eggs, and eggs in a frame.
There are different ways of cooking potatoes in the dinner section, and I also like the popcorn variations in the snack section, which include different ways to flavor popcorn with cheese or peanut butter.
The dessert section includes brownies (“Disgustingly Rich”), chocolate chip cookies, and some more unusual desserts, like frozen bananoids, which are pieces of banana covered in chocolate and frozen.
The section of non-edible recipes also includes a recipe for dog biscuits, Fido’s Fabulous People Crackers. They’re edible for dogs, just not something people would enjoy.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
Children’s Quick and Easy Cook Book by Angela Wilkes, 1997.
When I was expanding my cooking skills as an adult, I started doing it using children’s cookbooks instead of cookbooks for adults because of the simplified instructions. When I bought this one, I hadn’t realized that it was originally a British book. I have the American edition, but the reason why I discovered that it was a British book is that the types of recipes the book offers includes some that are more common in the UK than in the US. A friend of my family, who was originally from England, spotted it and was happy to hear that I’d be learning to make some of these recipes. The recipes provide both metric and imperial measurements for the ingredients (another clue that this is an international book). There is a section in the beginning of the book that explains how to use the book and some general cooking safety tips. In the back of the book, there is a helpful Picture Glossary that demonstrates various cooking techniques and concepts used in the book, like how to use a marinade, how to core an apple, how to separate eggs, and how to roll out pastry. It’s all useful information for beginning-level cooks.
The recipes are divided into helpful sections, including snacks, meals, desserts, and sweets. The book is heavy on desserts, candy, and sweets, but many of the recipes under the snacks section are what Americans (and possibly British people, too, although I’m less sure there) might consider as breakfasts, lunches, and general light meals. In particular, the snack section includes sandwiches of various kinds. Some of the ingredients for the sandwiches sound uncommon for the US, although that might also vary by region. I can’t recall seeing salami and cream cheese together before, but I wouldn’t mind trying it sometime. Some sandwiches also call for ingredients like cherry compote and mango chutney. I think that serving grated chocolate on croissants or other bread items is also a European thing. I’ve seen it packaged just for that purpose at international grocery stores and import stores. Some of the snacks are more like snack items in American cook books, like flavored popcorn and smoothies.
The section of Speedy Meals include omelets, two kinds of soup, tacos, and pasta. Some recipes are common ones in the US, too, like chicken nuggets, chicken burgers, and fish sticks. The Turkish Meatballs with lamb, Falafel, Tabbouleh, and Chicken Curry and Rice are less common, but are still eaten here, especially if you live in areas with international restaurants and grocery stores.
Of course, the desserts and sweets are particularly fun recipes. I particularly enjoyed making the cream puffs! There are different types of cookies included and candies like chocolate truffles and peppermint creams.
Many of the desserts would be familiar to Americans, like the chocolate cake, carrot cake, lemon cheesecake, and Baked Alaska. However, there were also a few desserts that were new to me. I had never heard of Clafouti before, and this was the first place I had heard of Knickerbocker Glories, a kind of parfait or sundae with layers of ice cream and fruit. (If you remember Harry Potter referring to a Knickerbocker Glory in one of the books, here is what it is!)
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
This cookbook has easy recipes that kids can make with their friends at sleepovers, parties, or anytime they want to eat together and include cooking as an activity. Some of the recipes are made from scratch, and some include shortcuts, like using pre-packaged pie dough and crescent roll dough.
The recipes are divided into sections with two sections devoted to snacks, Starter Snacks and Sacktime Snacks (bedtime snacks). There are other sections for meals – dinners, breakfasts, and brunch or lunch. There is also one extra section for birthday treats. The introduction to the book says that it isn’t really important when readers use the recipes – if you want to use a starter snack as a bedtime snack or eat a dinner recipe for breakfast, it’s all up to you. The sections are just to make it easier to find certain types of recipes.
As expected in a book of sleepover recipes, there are plenty of sugary treats, but there is one specifically “healthy” recipe for each section in the book, marked by a heart in the table of contents. The snacks include traditional kid favorites like cookies, popcorn balls, and s’mores. However, even some of the recipes that aren’t specifically labeled “healthy” are still non-sugary, like guacamole and hot taco dip.
The meal recipes also include many popular favorites. Dinner recipes include chicken pot pie, taco salad, spaghetti and meatballs, and homemade pizza. Breakfast recipes include cream cheese and ham omelettes, chocolate chip muffins, and banana nut French toast. Lunch recipes include tuna melts (called Tuna Meltdowns), bow-tie pasta salad, chicken veggie sticks (kebabs), and turkey burgers.
The section of birthday treats has recipes for different types of cakes and a few non-cake treats like brownie sundaes and Fundue (chocolate dessert fondue).
Each of the recipes in the book comes with ratings, indicating the difficulty of the recipes, although none of them were are really very difficult in general, and the amount of time it takes to make them. One of the things that I liked about this book, besides the ease of the recipes is that the book, is that the pictures show boys cooking as well as girls. I think it’s good that the book portrays cooking as something that both boys and girls can do because it’s a useful life skill for everyone and something that anybody can do for fun.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
Colonial American Holidays and Entertainment by Karen Helene Lizon, 1993.
This book explains how people living in Colonial America would entertain themselves and celebrate holidays. Both entertainment and holidays varied between time periods and geographical areas.
In the early days of European colonies in North America, life was hard. People were occupied with daily survival and the establishment of their communities. As their communities expanded and became more settled, they were gradually able to have more leisure time. The book begins with a general history of the American colonies, briefly explaining the range of countries the early colonists came from, the effect their arrival had on Native Americans, and the role that indentured servants played in society and the adoption of slavery as a means of obtaining workers.
I was glad that they brought up the point about indentured servitude and slavery because I remember discussing it in my college history courses. Indentured servants were people who would agree to work for someone for a period of time in return for having that person pay for their passage to the colonies. There was a benefit for both sides in indentured servitude. For the indentured servants, they used their labor as a means to pay for transportation to the colonies that they could not have afforded by themselves, and once they had worked for the required period, they would be free to establish themselves independently in the colonies. For those who paid for the indentured servants, they would have guaranteed workers for the period of the indenture. However, plantation owners and other employers soon realized that they were not finding as many indentured servants as they wanted, and they didn’t like losing their labor force when their terms of indenture ended the workers left their employ. Therefore, they began to turn to slavery as a means of gaining a steady stream of workers who could not say no to them, no matter what the working conditions were like, and could never leave. Slavery wasn’t so much about race in the beginning as economics and employers who wanted cheap, permanent labor and didn’t care how they got it or what it would mean to the people they bought. But, I have other books that say more about what that led to. This book is mostly about lighter subjects, but it does acknowledge the serious aspects of American history and also makes the point that these completely unwilling immigrants also became a part of American society and, like other groups who came to America willingly, also brought traditions and folklore of their own that would gradually become part of American society, entertainment, and celebrations.
During the Colonial period, celebrations and entertainment varied throughout the regions of the American colonies, depending on the mixture of colonists living there and the holidays and traditions they brought with them from their homelands. Some of their holidays were ones that we still celebrate today, while others have fallen out of favor.
The book is divided into chapters based on different aspects of entertainment, and I’ve given a brief description of each, although all of these sections have more detail than I’ve provided. I particularly recommend reading the book if you would like more information about Native American entertainment or the lives of slaves because there is more information about these topics than I’ve described.
The chapters are:
Winter and Spring Holidays
Christmas seems like one of the most obvious holidays for colonists to celebrate, but it wasn’t so straight-forward. First, not all of the colonists were Christian (there were some Jewish people in parts of the colonies, and they celebrated Hanukkah in the winter), and even among those who were Christian, not all actually celebrated Christmas. The Puritans, who wanted to separate themselves as much as possible from traditions which they thought were not part of pure Christianity, did not celebrate Christmas. In fact, they didn’t celebrate many holidays or special days at all. Apart from the Sabbath, they only had a Day of Humiliation and Fasting and a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise, and those were not regularly scheduled events to be held on any specific date; they were only declared when it seemed that circumstances called for them. A Day of Humiliation and Fasting would happen at a time when things were going badly and the community was suffering, and the Puritans would use that day for prayer, reflection on their sins, and repentance. A Day of Thanksgiving and Praise would happen when the community was prosperous and felt blessed, and it was a time of prayer and feasting.
Also, among the Christians who did celebrate Christmas, not all of them celebrated it on the same day, and different groups had different customs for Christmas, depending on where they were originally from. People from Sweden celebrated St. Lucia Day on December 13th, and people from the Netherlands celebrated Sinterklaas Eve and Day on December 5th and 6th. It was also common for Christmas celebrations to continue through the Twelfth Night from Christmas itself, January 6th, also call Epiphany (the day that the Wise Men visited Jesus).
Easter is a common Spring holiday in modern times, but in Colonial times, it wasn’t so widely or elaborately celebrated. Colonial children were not told stories about an “Easter Bunny” delivering eggs or candy, although colonists from the Netherlands did decorate eggs with natural dyes and scratched designs into the shells.
A spring holiday that many of the colonists celebrated (but not the Puritans) but few people celebrate in modern America was May Day. On May 1st, people would gather flowers and dance around a Maypole.
Summer and Fall Holidays
The Fourth of July is the essential summer holiday of modern America, but it didn’t exist until the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Many people’s lives centered around agriculture in colonial times, so fall was harvest time for them. Some colonists (although, not all, and definitely not the Puritans) also celebrated Halloween. The holiday was particularly celebrated in communities where there were people of Irish descent. (This book doesn’t say so, but at this time, it was particularly a Catholic holiday, the eve before All Saints’ Day on November 1st, although some other Christians celebrated it, too. Some Protestant groups, especially the Puritans, shunned the holiday as being too Catholic. I covered the general history of Halloween in more detail on my site of Halloween Ideas, including how Halloween became a secular American holiday.)
In some areas, colonists celebrated an anti-Catholic holiday called Pope’s Day on the 5th of November, where they would burn effigies of the pope. This was an older holiday than the English Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated on the same day, and that holiday was also celebrated in the parts of the colonies with English influence.
Of course, both colonists and Native Americans had harvest celebrations in the fall, including the periodic Thanksgiving feasts that led to our modern Thanksgiving holiday.
Sports and Recreation
Much of the lives of the early colonists focused on basic survival and the establishment of their new communities. (The book explains some of the ways Native Americans helped the early colonists to survive and adapt to their new environment and to unfamiliar foods.) There was always work to be done, and even young children had to help with daily chores. Still, they found ways to enjoy themselves. Hunting expeditions were a kind of adventure, and children were often assigned the fun chore of picking berries.
Then they had leisure time, they would enjoy games like shovelboard (like shuffleboard but played on long tables), ninepins or bowling (done at first outside on the village green), and billiards (some of the more prosperous families had their own billiard tables). In the 17th century, ninepins was the primary form of bowling with pins instead of our modern ten-pin games. Ninepins, also called Skittle, was the game that Rip Van Winkle played in the story set during this time by Washington Irving. When they talked about just “bowling”, they didn’t use pins at all, instead rolling a ball toward a designated mark on the ground. Boys played stick-and-ball types of games, like stool ball. Even Colonial women enjoyed a game of stool ball. Other games and sports Colonial people enjoyed include quoits (a ring toss game), tennis, battledores, swimming, canoe races, foot races, wrestling, and horse races. Wealthy families even engaged in fencing and (believe it or not) jousting.
During the winter, children built snow forts and had snowball fights and went sledding. Both adults and children went ice skating.
Games and Toys
Many Colonial children’s toys were homemade. It was common for boys to whittle wooden toys for themselves such as whistles and windmills. Boys also had toy guns and bows and arrows. Colonial children liked to roll hoops, either homemade wooden ones or metal hoops from an old barrel. They rolled the hoops upright along the ground using a stick to keep them going, and the object was to go as fast as possible without loosing control of the hoop or having it fall. (They did not use hoops as hula hoops.) Native Americans also played with hoops, and they liked to make it a challenge to throw a spear through a moving hoop. In modern times, jump rope is often considered a girl’s game, but in Colonial times, it was more popular with boys, and they had their own jump rope rhymes. Colonial children also played with spinning tops, marbles (Native Americans had their own traditional marble games as well), jackstones (a precursor to modern Jacks), kites, toy boats, balls, and swings. Girls had dolls (usually homemade and sometimes corn husk dolls at harvest time and paper dolls they made themselves), and some of the more fortunate girls had doll cradles and dollhouses with furniture. Many homemade toys were actually very durable and were passed on through families for generations.
Children also played many games that are still popular on modern playgrounds, including various forms of tag, counting-out rhymes (like the kind modern children use to choose who is going to be “it” in a game), hide and seek, blindman’s buff, leapfrog, cat’s cradle, and hopscotch (which they called “scotch hoppers”). Sometimes, they played board games, like Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, and Nine Men’s Morris.
People throughout the colonies played various types of dice, domino, and card games, some of which were gambling games. Gambling rules and taboos differed throughout the colonies, but in some areas, even children were allowed to gamble.
Social Amusements
A primary form of entertainment in Colonial times was visiting friends and neighbors, and they developed a form of social etiquette around visiting. Some people had specific days when they were expected at friends’ homes, and people often left calling cards to show that they had visited. (Since people couldn’t phone someone to say that they were coming to visit, they either had to prearrange the visit ahead of time to ensure that they were expected or leave a calling card if the person they were visiting happened to not be home, so they would know that a friend stopped by and wanted to talk to them.) Women who lived in towns held tea parties, and pioneer families had picnics that included fishing and berry-picking.
There were seasonal fairs in spring and fall with entertainment like juggling, puppet shows, tightrope walking, fortune-telling, music, exotic animal shows, and various types of contests. The fairs were also part business and involved trading and selling various types of products.
Colonists’ social lives also included political and religious community meetings. Towns would hold meetings to discuss town business and issues of local concern. Election days for public offices often had an air of public celebration as people watched public speeches and debates and booths sold good things to eat to the spectators. Citizens were welcome to attend criminal court trials and witness public punishments designed to humiliate offenders. Communities held market days when farmers, businessmen, and even Native Americans could gather to buy, sell, and trade products.
Church attendance and activities varied by denomination and geographical location. In some areas, church attendance was mandatory, and people would not engage in any other business or activity on Sunday. In areas where neighbors didn’t live close to each other, church was one of their main opportunities to see each other, and it was common for families to meet and share meals after church or for young men to visit with girls they liked.
Taverns, inns, and coffee houses also became important community meeting places. They could be uses as places for community meetings, political discussions, arranging business deals, distributing news and mail, and (as a later chapter explains) sometimes theatrical performances.
Entertainment and Pastimes
Because Colonial life was often hard and full of work, learning how to entertain yourself at home and keep yourself amused while performing chores were important. Work and entertainment often went hand-in-hand, and social occasions were often accompanied by chores and activities to keep the hands busy. Children started learning useful skills early in life. By the age of five years old, girls were able to sew. They also learned knitting, weaving, and embroidery, showing off the range and variety of stitches they knew in hand-sewn samplers. (Originally, samplers were meant to be exactly that – samples of the variety of sewing stitches a girl knew how to do. They were meant to be a demonstration of learning and accomplishment. They were very different from modern samplers that only contain one stitch – cross stitch.) Girls as well as boys knew how to whittle wood, and it was common for children to trade things they had made themselves for other things they wanted. Families had gardens where they grew vegetables, herbs, and flowers that the family could enjoy, and some women developed side businesses selling vegetable and flower seeds from the family garden.
While not everyone knew how to read, many people did, and they would read books like the Bible, works by Shakespeare, and books of poetry. Some people even wrote poetry for fun. Benjamin Franklin opened the first lending library in Philadelphia in 1731. Families often provided their own entertainment in the evening, telling stories and folktales around the fire.
Communities also had musical performances and public dances. Different colonies had different customs regarding dancing, with some communities making it taboo for men and women to dance together. Wealthy plantation owners held fancy formal balls. Music was a common part of children’s education because people who knew how to sing or play an instrument could help entertain their families at home. Some people simply used improvised instruments made out of various objects that they happened to have on hand, like a comb covered in paper, spoons, or tin kettles.
Early American Observances
Aside from the holidays described earlier, there were other special occasions that communities celebrated. Families gathered to celebrate births, baptisms, and weddings. Even funerals, while being a time of mourning, were also social gatherings. Sometimes, wealthy families would give little gifts to those who attended family funerals.
Some children had birthday parties. In the early days of the colonies, people were too occupied with the business of survival to bother much with remembering birthdays, but as communities became more settled and stable, birthdays were increasingly celebrated, especially among the more prosperous families. Sometimes, children were excused from chores on their birthday, and they were often given practical gifts.
Native American groups also had their own seasonal festivals and ceremonies of thanksgiving that varied among tribes. These seasonal festivals marked times for planting or harvesting crops or moving to seasonal quarters. They would also have ceremonies to mark special life events, like testing boys to see if they were ready to be men in their communities.
Working Bees
As I said, work and fun often went hand-in-hand in Colonial America, and sometimes, the colonists would hold special working parties called “bees.” When people got together in big groups to take care of major chores, the work got done faster, and they could have fun talking and visiting with each other while they did it. When they finished with whatever task they set out to do, they would finish the event with food, games, and other fun activities.
At harvest time, they would hold harvest parties to harvest food and prepare it for storage. At apple bees (the parties, not the restaurant), people would peel and core apples and make apple-based foods, like cider and applesauce. At husking bees, they would husk corn. There was also an element of flirting to husking bees because, if a man found an ear of red corn, he was allowed to kiss a woman sitting near him.
At other times of the year, they would hold different types of bees for specific tasks or crafts. “Raising days” were when people got together to build a new building, like a house, barn, or public building, like a schoolhouse. Women held quilting bees and knitting bees. Children today still compete in spelling bees, just like colonial children did. “Sparking bees” were kind of like colonial singles meetups. Single young people in the community would come to the bee to meet each other, and if they found someone who “sparked” their interest, they could begin a formal courtship with that person.
Games, Goodies, Gifts
The final chapter of the book has words for the counting-out rhyme “Intry, Mintry” and the rules for the tag game Fox and Geese and the spinning top game Chipstones. There are recipes for Maple Sugar-on-Snow, Furmenty, Speculaas (a Dutch Christmas cookie), and Raspberry Flummery (a sweet drink). There are also instructions for making a pomander ball.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
Brother Eagle, Sister Sky: A Message from Chief Seattle with paintings by Susan Jeffers, 1991.
This is a picture book, but not one for very young children because of the serious subject matter. It’s a profound book with beautiful pictures, but before presenting it to children, adults should be sure that the children are old enough to understand the background of the book.
The book begins with some information about its background. It describes the variety of “Indian” (Native American) tribes that have lived in the Americas for thousands of years and how, after white settlers arrived from Europe, they were killed and pushed off their ancestral lands by the new arrivals. It’s historically true, but also dark subject matter, which is why it’s important for the children reading the book to be old enough to understand it. Most of the book is the text of a speech made by Chief Seattle (who lived c. 1786 to 1866) to the Commission of Indian Affairs for the Territory and other government employees when the US government wanted to buy land from his tribe. The historical details concerning this speech from the mid-1850s are complicated, and accounts of it might not be completely accurate, and there is a note in the back of the book that addresses that. I consider the spirit of this speech something worth preserving, so I won’t get too hung up on that right now. I just mention it for the sake of people interested in going deeper into the history.
Susan Jeffers particularly wants readers to consider the environmental message of the speech and how relevant the message is today for a society that has endangered itself by placing a higher priority on the acquisition of land, resources, and wealth than on preserving the land and environment that makes life itself possible. This book was written in the early 1990s, and having been a child at that time myself, I know that these themes were increasingly becoming topics in schools and in children’s entertainment during that time. I’d like to point out that I, and others who are younger than me, have heard similar messages about environmental concerns from an early age. This has given us different priorities from earlier generations who did not, although it’s also worth pointing out that many of us came to care more about the environment as children because of the influence of adults who already did.
Chief Seattle questioned the concept of buying land because of the absurdity of buying aspects of nature, like the sky or rain. Land and nature had sacred spiritual meaning for Chief Seattle’s people.
Chief Seattle’s speech was full of poetic imagery, as he explained how his people felt like they were part of the land and it was part of them. He said that they looked on animals like they were brothers.
The land also connected them to their ancestors and the memories of their people.
Chief Seattle questioned what would happen in the future, when the land was filled with people and all of the animals either killed or tamed, painting a bleak picture of a land deprived of life.
The speech ended with the thought that people didn’t “weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it.” Chief Seattle called on the people wanting to buy the land to love it, care for it, and preserve it because “Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”
The environmental themes of the message are poignant for modern times because people have become increasingly aware of the consequences of environment pollution and careless use of natural resources.
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