School Summary - Field Trip to Jamestown in Virginia's Historic Triangle

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A Summary of September 15-19

We took our first week long break from our Sabbath schooling schedule (6ish weeks on, 1 week off), and we sure put our break to good use. We were so thankful to be able travel to Virginia for a week to explore their Historic Triangle: Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown.

Colonial Williamsburg schedules special Homeschool Days each fall and spring and offer extremely discounted rates for homeschoolers as well as extra programs at each location. I'll give you a run down of what we did in case you want to make the trip yourself.
This started getting way too long so I'll break it down by location. Check out the rest of our trip here and here.

Monday: Jamestown
We started our trip with one full day at Jamestown. We jumped right in with an extra classroom presentation for each of the younglings. Soprano learned more about Life at Jamestown (food, clothing, tools, weapons, housing, money) with artifacts and replicas, then went to the fort to talk to an interpreter about cooking.

Each student had the chance to either grind herbs for a pottage that was being prepared or grate cinnamon for a bread pudding the interpreter was cooking.

Tenor was in a class called Voyage to Jamestown which talked about all aspects of sailing from England to the new world and what life was like on the ship. Their class went down to the harbor to work together to load a barrel onto the Discovery.

After their classes, we took a two-hour guided tour. We started with The Discovery Tower.

 Then we went to the Powhatan Indian village.

Weaving rope from fibers (raffia) like the Indians would have done

Indian jewelry

They had the chance to scrape the deer hide using an oyster shell.

After that we walked down to the harbor area to see replicas of the three ships the colonists sailed over on (The Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery).

Lastly, we toured the fort and saw a musket demonstration.

In one of the colonists' bedrooms.

Trying on armor

When our tour finished, we headed out to the parking lot to eat our packed lunch. (After stopping by the cafe for a large cup of caffeine for me.) After a lunch break, we headed back into the museum area. We watched the Jamestown movie and went through the museum on our own. We ended up getting into another tour group for one of the exhibits which the younglings loved.

When we had first arrived, we were given a scavenger hunt for the younglings. It was a little much to fit everything in since we had done the classes and the tour but we squeaked it in. The scavenger hunt has children visit each area of Jamestown (museum gallery, fort, village, harbor) and look for answers to questions. At each location, they had to find a costumed interpreter and give them the answer to one of the questions for that location. They were then given the secret word to fill into an anagram puzzle. After lunch and our quick trip through the gallery, we set out to solve the puzzle. We made it back to the information desk just barely before they were closing for the day to get their prizes.

We had never been to Jamestown so it was exciting to explore everything. More so because we had just studied Jamestown.

Tips that might be helpful if you go:
*If you attend during Homeschool Days, be aware that you should sign up for your tour, classes, and extras as soon as you can. We were limited in our time choices because I delayed.
*The tour was very well done and hands-on. It was free with our Homeschool Day admission price.
*They have a restaurant on site. No outside food or drink is allowed.
*Parking is free.
*It's a lot of walking. Wear appropriate shoes.
*The gallery movie was very well done. It's worth making the time to see.
*There are costumed interpreters but they are not locked into their colonial era like the folks at Williamsburg. There also aren't as many. A lot of the grounds are self-guided.