Plimoth Plantation! By Elizabeth and Michael

This is Plymouth Rock.  It has the numbers on it that say it is from a long time ago.  It is what they anchored their ship on.  People moved it a lot of times, so it broke.  Now it’s in a cage by the sea.

We look at the map to see where we are.   We are finding the Mayflower II.  It’s fun to read maps and see where you are and how to get to the Mayflower.

This is us going to the Mayflower II.  It is called the Mayflower II because they couldn’t find the first Mayflower, so they had to make another one just like it.  It can really sail in the bay and then come back.  On the first Mayflower, there were 102 people, not counting the sailors.  They slept on the bottom with lots of the food and animals.  It took them 2 months to get to Plymouth, and then they landed in 1620.  When we went aboard the ship, we saw cannons and there were people that were dressed up and talked like them.

This is something they used to navigate while they sailed.  Sailors used it to keep track of the direction and the speed every hour. 

We went into one of the Pilgrim’s houses.  She was making rice pudding.  Her house was very small.  It had one room where they cooked, slept and ate.  It was hard to live in the Colonial Times because you had to make all your own food and houses and dishes and sew your clothes and make bread with the wheat that you grew.

The man had to cut the reeds for the roof of their houses.  Imagine how hot it would be to be wearing those clothes!  His pants are made of leather and his hat and socks were made with wool from a sheep.

All of their food and nutrients came from their gardens.  She was picking onions and carrots today.  They didn’t have doctors, so lots of their plants were used for medicine.

This Wampanoag house is called a wigwam.  This is their summer home, because the reeds let the air come in, but when it rains the reeds hold out all the water.  Their winter home is made of bark.  It is huge, so that they could have many families inside it. 

He is burning out a tree to make a boat.  That’s how they go from one place to another.  They could go from Plymouth all the way to Cape Cod to trade and fish.  They had paddles.  Some trees were so big that 40 men could fit into a canoe!

In the old days, there could be trees with trunks wider than the circle we made with the Wampanoag man. 

Squanto was an Indian who taught the Pilgrims how to grow crops.  The Three Sisters crops first let the corn grow, then the bean stalks grow up the corn stalk, then the squash grew on the bottom. 

Video of our fun trip: