I Survived: The Battle of Gettysburg, 1863

I Survived: The Battle of Gettysburg by Lauren Tarshis 

If you've never heard of the I Survived series by Lauren Tarshis and you work with elementary ages then I can only assume you've been living under a rock for the past year or so. These books are nearly on par with Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Geronimo Stilton in our library - we can barely keep them on the shelf! Very popular. 

This realistic fiction series takes historical events such as wars and natural disasters and puts a child right in the midst of it. It's almost similar to the American Girl series in that respect however, one thing I like about this series is they are more gender neutral - making them a perfect series to base a book club around. This was my thought process when I choose this series for our 2018 school aged book club. 

I Survived: The Battle of Gettysburg was the first on our list.

For this book club meeting , we broke it up into up into 3 parts: Discussion, Craft and Snacks.

Discussion

While trying to prepare for this program, I watched Youtube videos, documentaries and read several books trying to figure out what we could spend an afternoon talking about. Of course we would talk about the book, but I also wanted to talk about the war and what the daily life of a Civil War soldier would have been like. But yall, I became SO overwhelmed! There was just too much information and I hit a mental wall. 

Thankfully my dad, an Army National Guard veteran was able to come out and talk about the Civil War! 

As a collector (and with approval!), he was able to bring several neat things to show the kids including: an 1862 musket with a bayonet, an 1856 coin, and 1863 coin - which was VERY cool since that was when our book was set - and some bullets that were dug up at Shiloh. 

My coworker, whose husband was a very enthusiastic reenactor several years back even let us borrow a coat that he would wear during reenactments. This was an authentic replica of an infantry soldiers coat.

The program lasted about an hour.  We started out discussing our favorite parts of the book,  talked about the Civil War (THANKS DAD!), made candles for our craft and had a snack.

Candle-Making Craft

Supplies: 1 lb Beeswax

                Candle Wicks

                Pencils

                Candy Melter

                Containers of water

This craft is repetition at it's finest!

We wrapped the candle wicks around the pencil securely and took turns dipping them into the hot wax. Once a wick had been dipped into the wax, it had to be dipped into the water. Our aim was to dip each wick 25 times (we might have lost count several times).

Eventually a candle forms. Surprisingly this wasn't as messy a craft as I had thought it would be. Instead, the bulk of the mess was just getting the dried wax off the candy melter and other containers.

Snacks for this program were cornbread and molasses cookies.

Overall, this program was a lot of fun! Although, I don't think it would have been the same without having our special guest speaker 😀 Next month is I Survived: The Japanese Tsunami... hope it lives up to this one!!

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