The Learning Curve

I Survived The American Revolution, 1776

Full disclaimer: this blog post is coming MONTHS after this book club meeting, so my memory might be a little hazy. What can I say? Life's been busy!

This book is based on the Battle of Brooklyn, which is known as one of the bloodiest battles in the American Revolution. It is also known as the first battle on American soil after the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Several months prior to this battle, the British had been run out of Boston. George Washington anticipated that the British would attack America next by trying to take New York, so the Colonial Army was marched from Boston to New York. British ships begin arriving in New York in July 1776, which is where a the main part of our story is.

Nate, is a young boy who runs away from his Loyalist guardian (Uncle Stortch), catches a ship to NYC, sees the impending war and finds himself amongst Washington's Army as a camp helper.

For our book club meeting, we had 3 main parts: Discussion, Activity/Craft and Snack. However, unlike most meetings, the format of this one was a little different than others. We started with snacks instead of discussion.

SNACK

In my search for themed snack ideas, I ran across a book series in our collection called Colonial American Crafts. The series has books on crafts in the home, village and school. In The Village, were some great craft ideas, but what struck me was the recipe for muffins. I absolutely loved that the recipe came from a Colonial craft inspired book.

It specifically called for cranberries, which are a fruit specific to America. Colonists incorporated them into different uses, including cakes, breads, ink, dyes, etc.

If they had been in season, I would have used them, but despite my best efforts, no local stores could be found that were selling cranberries. Thankfully, blueberries were also a popular colonial fruit. And they were in season. So we used blueberries.

Because these took 20-25 minutes to bake, as soon as kids arrived, we dove into our baking. They were SUPER excited to bake.

All baking supplies were supplied and ready. I had brought a toaster oven from home to bake in, since our library does not have a kitchen. Kids were given gloves to wear as they baked and I stood back to let them take the reins on this project. I only stepped in momentarily when the salt measurement was accidentally tripled.

Our group was right around 5 kids, so our number was perfect for this, with everyone participating.

PDF of recipe below

Activity/Craft

For our craft we made ink and quills, using feathers and blueberries. This idea also came from Colonial American Crafts series, specifically The School book. I'll attach the original recipe to the bottom of this post as well, but I took a fair bit of liberty to adapt this recipe for a library setting.

For starters, the original recipe calls for cranberries, but blueberries can be easily substituted.

The whole concept of this recipe is to heat the berries and crush them to release their color. This is used for ink.

Because there is no stove to heat berries at the library, I brought in a mini crock-pot to let the berries simmer in the heat for the day. This softened them up perfectly.

An hour before book club, I turned off the crock-pot to let them cool and for our activity, they used spoons and strainers to extract the color from the blueberries.

We snipped the tips off our feathers for an angle and practiced our writing.

As a take home, each kid went home with a small vial of ink and their quill. Tip: we used a turkey baster to squeeze ink from our larger container into the small bottle.

These 2 activities were HUGE crowd pleasers and I would definitely repeat these. Yes, they're a mess but totally worth it.

Good luck with your book club planning and hope this helps!

Colonial American Crafts: The Village by Judith Hoffman Corwin BLUEBERRY MUFFIN RECIPE

Colonial American Crafts: The School by Judith Hoffman Corwin INK RECIPE

💚💛💜

I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912

Yall. Hands down, this is the best book in the series! ... However, this was also the meeting where I forgot to take pictures...😞 So bear with me. This is going to be short and sweet.

SNACK

I always try to have a themed snack in book club and this month it was lemon cookies. If you recall, George's sister Phoebe carried lemon drops around in a tin can and when she ventured into the baggage hold, she had left a trail of lemon drop cookies behind her.

We had Nilla Lemon Wafer Cookies and Archway Frosty Lemon Cookies.

ACTIVITY

For our activity, we had a team-based trivia inspired relay race.

Objective: The objective of this race was to earn points for your team by correctly answering the trivia question. You earned points by racing to the chair with the highest point value. (See my professional design plan? ⇨)

Points: Each chair had a different point value which was written on a sign and taped to the wall.

Set Up: I had a list of 20 trivia questions and each team got an exact same set of 20 answer cards. The answer cards already had the correct answers on them. When I asked a trivia question, it was their job to sort through their cards, find the one with the correct answer and race to a chair.

If you answered the trivia question correctly, your team earned those chairs points. If your team answered the question incorrectly, your team lost those chair points.

Strategy: Teams that weren't confident their answer was correct would choose a chair with the lowest point value. That way, if it was wrong, their team might only lose 20 points compared to 50 points.

You can see the answer cards in the picture below. The different colors differentiate the different teams.

Questions and Answer Card PDFs are posted below!

Remember those activity sheets in school where you have to draw the line from the question to the correct answer on the opposite side of the page? This game is similar to that, only with more competition and excitement.

One thing I would have done differently would be to have lower point values. I used 20, 30, 40 & 50 which turned out to be a little tricky for some of our younger groups to solve when it came to adding and subtracting those points.

Teams kept track of their own points throughout the game.

HANDS ON
You can't have a Titanic book club without making an iceberg. Right?

This is one of the things I forgot to take a picture of, but to make my iceberg, I just filled a large bucket with water and stuck it inside the freezer for a few days. If you've made ice cubes, you don't need me to explain this though 😉

The group loved seeing who could hold their hands on the ice the longest.

ALL IN ALL

This was probably one of our best discussions since I Survived the Joplin Tornado. Everything about this book, our discussion, the game, all of it was engaging.

CLICK HERE for Titanic Relay Questions
CLICK HERE for Titanic Relay Answer Cards