When I was in elementary school, my aunt and uncle lived in Boston. We would travel to Plymouth (because I begged each year) to visit the recreated Plymouth Plantation during the summer. Ever since, I have loved learning about the lives of the early colonists.
Now that I am teaching, I enjoy focusing on the Pilgrims and Plymouth Plantation during the month of November. We often read three books off and on over the course of the month: Samuel Eaton’s Day, Tapenum’s Day, & Sarah Morton’s Day. These three books are written from the child’s point of view and are highly engaging because of the real photographs. The children in all three books are based off of a real child who lived in Plymouth long ago.
Depending on the grade level you teach, these books can be read from cover to cover (they’re quite long) or by simply focusing on specific parts. When teaching first grade and kindergarten, I pick certain pages to read every few days. When teaching third grade, I would read half of one book during our real aloud.
My favorite way to use this book to teach about the way pilgrim children dressed. Samuel Eaton’s Day gives a step-by-step process of how to put on a young boy’s clothing. Students LOVE looking at each individual piece and laughing at the fact that little boys wore dresses! After reading, we compare and contrast the way Samuel dressed to the way we dress. I will be using this book with my kindergarteners this year to practice sequencing when writing. We will be writing about what the pilgrim boys wore using Samuel Eaton’s Day and then what the pilgrim girls wore using Sarah Morton’s Day. My students will have to list three pieces of clothing in the order that the children put them on in the 1600s. I will add pictures of that soon!
If you are interested in using this book in your classroom, click here to download the writing paper and head over to Amazon and grab a copy!
