Colonial time game

Although children in Colonial times worked hard around the house or farm to help their family, when they had free time, they would frequently spend it playing games. Kids would often play outside or make simple toys with scraps of wood or cloth. When your family studies the early days of our country, be sure to take some time away from the textbook to enjoy one of these games played in Colonial America. This post contains affiliate links. Kids in Colonial America found many ways to entertain themselves.

Here are a handful of fun activities they participated in years ago that you can play with your kids today. Kids in the 13 Colonies played jackstraws, the game that later became pick-up sticks. To make the game challenging enough, use at least 40 pieces. Marbles can be made of stone, clay, or glass. There are many different games you can play with marbles.

Then, draw 3 concentric squares on the paper with your pencil or marker. The next step is to add a dot to the midpoint of each side of every square like the picture below.

Now the board has 24 intersections, or points — 12 midsections and 12 corners. Children in colonial times enjoyed many of the same outdoor running games children still play today, like tag, leapfrog, and hide and seek.

Quoits Game. The Queen or King may move and capture forward or backward. Play continues until one player can no longer move. This is a bowling game that probably originated in continental Europe during the Middle Ages. The game of ninepins was brought to America by early Dutch colonists. A variety of pins, balls, and rules of play developed as bowling games evolved into the games we know today as skittles, duckpins, law bowls, bocce, and tenpins.

Ninepins can be played with 2 or more players. The object of the game is to knock down as many of the wooden pins as possible with each roll of the ball. The first player to score exactly 31 points is the winner. This whirligig is fashioned from a Spanish Dollar, also known as the piece of eight, a silver coin widely used during the 18th and early 19th centuries.

There are many variations of this toy, including the buzz saw. Buzz saws were usually wood, instead of metal, and made a buzzing sound as you played. In far-flung cultures and throughout history, buzzers have been made by and for children from all sorts of materials and in a variety of shapes and sizes. To learn more, make your own and give it a try! Place the loop formed at each end of the doubled string over two fingers of each hand and slide the button to the middle of the string.

With tension on the string, move your hands in a circular motion so that the button spins away from you and the string becomes twisted along its entire length. When the string is completely wound, simultaneously stop the circular motion and pull your hands apart gently, in a continuous motion.

The button will start to spin back toward you. Bring your hands toward each other just a bit to allow the string to rewind, then apart again each time the string is fully wound, in a gentle and rhythmic motion, slowing or quickening the speed of the whirligig by adjusting the timing and strength of your pull.

Explore This Park. El Galeon Background In the 16th century, even though native people occupied the land, Spain, England, France, and other European nations started to claim and settle the Americas. Visit our keyboard shortcuts docs for details Duration: 2 minutes, 23 seconds Learn more about the countries that controlled Florida. Colonial Life What was it like in the colonies? Why did colonial children play with toys and games? For fun! Also, in the colonial period, some games helped children learn skills they would need later in life as farmers and parents.

Games taught children how to aim and throw, how to solve problems and do things with their hands, and how to follow directions and rules. They also learned to be fair, wait their turn, and use their imagination. Where did colonial kids get their toys from? Most colonial children had to make do with what they had. There were no factories for making toys or toy stores.

Toys had to be found in nature or in the house, or adults and children had to make them. They made dolls from corn husks and rags. Leftover wood and string could be used to make spinning tops. Land with two feet on the double squares.

On the second turn, throw the rock into the second square, and so forth. The tricky part is staying on one foot when the rock is in one of the side-by-side squares. This game does not really have an object, but it is fun. One person puts on a blindfold while the others spin him around a few times. The blindfolded person is led around the yard in winding circles, etc. The blindfolded person then gets to guess where he is and then has his blindfold removed to reveal his location.

The game the colonists called jackstones is known today as jacks. You can buy a set, which includes six 6-pointed metal jacks.

Or you can be like colonial children and use six small stones, pumpkin seeds or any other small objects that are all the same size.

A set will include a small, bouncy ball, but any small ball with a good bounce will do. Or, like colonial children, use a round, smooth stone. If you use a stone, toss it the air rather than try to bounce it.

To start: a player tosses the ball in the air, scatters the jacks, and catches the ball on one bounce. During play, the player must pick up the jacks and catch the ball on one bounce with the same hand.

When picking up jacks, the player can touch only the ones they are picking up. If player moves or touches others, their turn is over. On any play, each player has only one try. If a player makes a mistake and loses their turn, on the next turn they go back to the beginning of theplay in which they made the mistake. The ball can bounce only once; if a stone is used, the stone is tossed in the air and must be caught before it lands.

Player 1 then puts the jack in the other hand and repeatsthe play, again picking up one jack. Player 1 continues until all six jacks have been picked up,one at a time. TO WIN: A player who goes from ones through sixes without an error is a winner, but this player canbe tied if another player also has a perfect round.

If the error was made on threes, for example, the player starts over at the beginning of threesies. To see a few other variations of Jacks-visit Games for Small Groups.

Jacks is 40 page bottom. If you are playing in a group with more than three players, you start by lining up in single file. The first person in the line takes a few steps forwards and then bends over to make the first frog. The next person in the line then leaps the first frog, carries on for a few steps and then bends over to make the second frog. The third person in the line then has to run and leap frogs one and two and then bends over to make the third frog.

This carries on until all the players have jumped. This can be played with one line or in Teams. The rest of the players hide. A number count is predetermined by the players. Get out a deck or cards or several and use them to build a tower. Lean one card against another, creating a triangle with the table top or floor. Create a second triangle a couple inches to the left or right of your first one, and connect the two with a card laying flat over top.

See how tall you can make your tower. This can be done as an individual, a team, or as a competition. A man named John Spilsbury, an engraver and mapmaker in London, attached maps of England to thin pieces of mahogany wood and then carefully cut around the shapes of the counties. Around the same time in France, a man working for the King made a similar game and thus the puzzle was born. Map puzzles were the most popular puzzle, but by puzzles with pictures of different kings were also made.

What would Mr. Spilsbury think of all the different types of puzzles we have today? These are now traditionally made with oranges, however, apples were used in Colonial Days A Pomador Ball was a large apple with cloves in it to give it a nice smell.

Materials: Large apple, box of cloves, cinnamon, a plastic net bag, ribbon or yarn. Insert a clove into each of the holes. Do this until the entire apple is covered with the cloves. Put the apple into a bowl and pour some cinnamon on it. Set the ball in a cool place for a few days.

At the top of the pomander ball tie —the remaining string from the loop into a knot and then hang. Source Thinkquest. The children liked patting it on trays and squishing it around and it smells really nice. Children helped to make it— as the recipe is pretty simple. Thanks Thank you Michele! When colonial families faced a hard task, they made the work lighter and more enjoyable by working together. They held flaxing bees, quilting bees and corn husking bees.

In the evening, after the work was done, the host family would serve a big meal and the children would play. For colonial women, quilting was not just the creation of a needed household item. Quilts were a thrifty use of material leftovers, a form of decoration and an expression of pride. In Colonial day, when every piece of cloth was brought from Europe at an opulent cost, each scrap left from the cutting of clothing was worth as much as its equivalent to the garment itself.

Each piece of cloth was fit together so that not a strand of the valuable material was wasted. It mainly consisted of silks, ribbons, wool, and velvets. It not only was the humblest of all bed-coverings, but it served the purpose of keeping the family warm on those cold winter nights.

Groups of women would gather together for several days in quilting bees, working together to make one beautiful quilt. Your squares should represent yourself. Draw your favorite food… write your name in calligraphy…draw a picture of a colonial craft item or someone using the craft item. When the square are done, punch holes along the edges and then use yarn to tie the squares together. Remove dandelions from the lawn. Pick those with long, thick stems. Attach them by tying one stem in a knot high up near the flower of another dandelion, and so on until reaching the desired length.

Take a nature walk on a clear, dry day. Collect any attractive flowers, leaves, grasses, and herbs. Separate each stalk or blossom. Place each one separately between the pages of the phone book, spacing them well apart from each other. Place the phone book in a cool, dry place for a week to ten days. Your leaves will then be totally dry and ready for use.

Carefully apply craft glue, just a dab, to the back of the dried leaf or flower. Center it on a note card for a single design or place several as a collage on a sheet of watercolor paper, which can later be framed.

Your leaf press can be used over and over again. Flowers can be stored in them for several months. Choose the largest, firmest apples you can find. The apples shrink a lot when they dry so you want to be sure that they are big enough to begin with. Firm apples will be easier to carve and will dry out much better.

You can core them if you would like, although it is not necessary. Next, brush a mixture of lemon juice and salt onto the peeled apple. The lemon juice and salt mixture will help to keeping the apples from turning as brown as usually when they dry. Focus on creating large features like the eye sockets, a nose and a mouth. Keep the shapes that you carve simple and larger than you think you need them to be since they will shrink as they dry. Turn them every couple of days in within about 2 weeks they will have shriveled up into ghoulish little faces.

You can speed up the drying time if you would like by setting them on a cookie sheet in the oven on the lowest setting or by using a food dehydrator, although it will still take some time for them to dry and shrivel. Make a dress out of a piece of fabric. You can even use a small paper clip to make glasses.

Silhouettes are a type of shadow picture. They have been made for centuries and became very popular during the life time of George Washington. Before cameras which make photographs were invented, the only way you could have a picture of a person was to have a painting or sketch made of that person. Since silhouettes required little skill as the shadow of a person was shown on a canvas and the outline painted in, they were inexpensive to have made.

Beyond a painted version, others trained in making silhouettes could cut out the profile of a person using black paper and then glue the black shape onto white paper. These artisans could look at a person and from the shape of their face, they could cut a silhouette without tracing it first.

Some simple machines like a pantograph which uses two pencils attached by grids which move at the same time were used to make copies of a silhouette or change their size. These copies were often made of famous people and could be given out to their many admirers.

Source: ushistory. To make a shadow picture of your friends and family, attach a black piece of construction paper to a hard surface like a door or a wall. Trace the shadow of the person on the paper with a piece of white chalk. Remove the paper from the wall and carefully cut along the chalk line.

Attach the cut out to a piece of white paper. You now have a finished silhouette! You can also use a pencil to trace the shadow on a white piece of paper. After tracing, color in the outline with a black crayon or marker. Colonial daily life, school, food, and clothing. Be sure to check out both pages. The combined data is not only informative but will help you make the most of this theme! The image to the left is the Noah Webster House, built about It is the restored birthplace and childhood home of the great lexicographer, Noah Webster.

The house was once part of a acre farm. This is a late 18th century tobacco farm in Virginia. Colonial America generally refers to that period of history prior to the American Revolution dating back to the establishment of North American settlements controlled by various European powers including France, Spain, the Netherlands, and in particular, Great Britain.

It commenced in , and ended with the onset of the American Revolution and the subsequent founding of an independent United States of America. Although of questionable success, Jamestown set the stage for other chartered incursions into the New World, including the Pilgrims of Mayflower fame who, seeking refuge from religious persecution, soon followed in , settling near Plymouth Rock in coastal Massachusetts. In rapid succession, prosperous British colonies sprang up along the Atlantic coast, from Maine in the north, to Georgia in the south.

Swedish and Dutch colonies also took shape in and around New Amsterdam in what is now New York State, while France and Spain continued to slowly expand their vast territories to the north, south, and west. As more and more people arrived in the New World, territorial disputes invariably arose between the competing European powers, as well as with the several Native American tribes whose homelands the Europeans had co-opted as their own.

Colonial America history was characterized by continuous expansion, hardship and privation, prosperity, and internecine warfare. By the end of this period, the two continental powers with the largest holdings in eastern North America were Great Britain and France. These two nations fought for control of eastern North America in what is known as the French and Indian War The British won the war and gained control of the valuable French settlements in Canada, as well as retaining control of their own highly productive colonies which stretched southward from Canada along the eastern seacoast.

The thirteen semi-autonomous colonies can be grouped into three general regions: New England, the Middle Colonies, and the Southern Colonies. Life within each region tended to evolve from the opportunities the land itself presented. Dietary staples such as corn and wheat grew in abundance, and much of it was shipped abroad. Because of its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean and the abundance of natural harbors and interior waterways, New England evolved into the hub of transport and commerce between colonial America and Europe, and Boston became its predominant port.

Wheat, barley, and other long grains flourished on rolling farmlands of Pennsylvania and New York. Foundries in Maryland produced pig-iron, while factories in Pennsylvania produced paper and textiles.

Raw materials and bulk products were shipped overseas and commercial trade was plentiful. THE SOUTHERN COLONIES… were almost entirely devoted to large scale labor-intensive agricultural production, whose characteristic feature became the development of plantations, large privately-owned plots of land comprised of farmlands dedicated almost exclusively to cash crops in high demand, including tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton.

Plantations served as agricultural factories whose production demands induced landlords to maximize profitability in high-risk ventures. Thus, the tragic trade in human slavery — long a staple of the British Empire — was introduced in , expanding rapidly throughout the south alongside the geometric rise of the wealthy land barons, whose power and influence would extend across the greater part of the next two centuries.

To that end, parents taught their children to read the Bible, and to endeavor to adhere to their interpretations of its teachings. However, New England villages established the first public grammar schools in which young men were taught Latin, mathematics, language composition, and other subjects needed to further their education toward a profession, or to secure a useful trade.

The emphasis was largely upon self-reliance, pragmatism, industry, and the adherence to Christian theology. Higher education was private and reserved for the wealthy few who could afford to send their young men abroad to study.