History - Pilgrims, Tipis and Dugouts

This week in history group we continued with our Pilgrims Lapbook, looking at the pilgrim's arrival on American shores. We discovered that they built primitive shelters while still living aboard the Mayflower - these shelters were mainly dugouts and tipis.

We thought it would be a fun idea to attempt to build mini versions to see how difficult a task it would have been, so I filled a box with earth for the dugout, and gave the girls a bundle of canes and an old sheet for the tipi.

Hannah and Ellen made the tipi first, they worked together to decide on the best way to construct it and were pretty pleased with their finished shelter.

Then they had a go at digging a dugout. They hollowed out the earth and used some to build up the walls, and then made a grass roof.

The pictures are terrible, but the dugout was really quite good!

Finally, a couple more activities added to the lapbook folder.

Oh, and as today is actually St Martin's day we lit our Martinmas candle tonight!

It looks really pretty on our season table!