Success Was Survival, and Kid, It Still Is

I told the kids today about the pioneer days here in Indiana. Now, in Social Studies and during the upcoming Colonial Days, we focus on life in the colonies. But at the same time, here in the backwoods of Indiana, they lived a different kind of life. We've been talking about what school was like, how they built their houses, and today we talked about what kind of food they ate, and how the cooked it. Ask your kids about Johnny Cakes, biscuits, and jerky. As I told them today, there wasn't a whole lot of variety at the time, and how hard they had to work to make it. Really, people worked pretty much from sun-up to sundown just to survive. Building the house, chopping wood, cooking, dipping candles, making their own clothes, and hunting were all a part of everyday life.

We also talked today about stamina, something that people of those days had a lot of! We talked about physical stamina and also "writing stamina". (Okay, so "stamina" was the word of the day today, FYI.) They need to build this up before the ISTEP test--and for life.