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Colonial Williamsburg Teacher Gazette
September 7, 2006Volume 5, Issue 1
Primary Source of the Month

A page from The Virginia House-Wife
A page from Mary Randolph, The Virginia House-Wife, Washington D.C, 1824 (Facsimile reprint, University of South Carolina Press, 1984).


CONTENTS

"Smokehouses"

Primary Source of the Month

Teaching Strategy

Colonial Williamsburg Teaching Resources

Teaching News

Quotation of the Month


The next
Electronic Field Trip is

Yorktown EFT
Yorktown
October 19, 2006



2006-2007 Teaching
Resources Catalog

2006-2007  Teaching Resources Catalog




PSCU Financial Services Logo

2006–2007 Electronic Field
Trip Scholarships



Kids Zone: History, Games & Fun
Games, activities, and resources about life in colonial America

TOP STORIES
"Smokehouses" by Michael Olmert

Summertime, in the eighteenth century, was no time for eating fresh pork. The oppressive heat that made quick work of humans in the Middle Atlantic colonies also turned the choicest cuts of meat into Petrie dishes of corruption. The day a pig was slaughtered, it was cooked and eaten . . . A frosty month, especially December, was the proper time for pig butchering, salting, and smoking. It's a tradition documented to medieval times.

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Primary Source of the Month:
Page from The Virginia House-Wife

In the eighteenth century, all cooks had to learn food preservation techniques. Young girls learned both cooking and preservation skills from their mothers and other female relatives. By the third quarter of the 1700s, many cookbooks and domestic instruction manuals also provided such information. This page from Mary Randolph's 1824 cookbook The Virginia House-Wife offers "Directions for Curing Beef."

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Teaching Strategy:
Food Preservation Methods

In this lesson, students will learn about four food preservation methods used during the colonial period—drying, salting, pickling, and jellying. They will work cooperatively to identify foods that are preserved in these ways, and then create an illustrated booklet describing one type of food preservation..

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Colonial Williamsburg Teaching Resources for Your Classroom

Colonial Williamsburg offers a variety of quality instructional materials dealing with 18th-century life, including:

- Hands-On History: Lady's Pocket (object kit)
- The Williamsburg Art of Cookery (book)
- If You Lived in Williamsburg in Colonial Days (book)

Learn More


Teaching News

Constitution Day
Congress has declared September 17th United States Constitution Day in celebration of the original ratification, September 17, 1787.The Newsweek Education Program has teamed with National History Day and Oxford University Press to bring teachers a variety of classroom activities to use in commemoration of Constitution Day. The activities, along with other recommended resources, are in a Newsweek ThisWeek Extra!

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Quotation of the Month

"Waste not, want not. The less we waste, the less we lack in the future."

English proverb


For more information about Colonial Williamsburg teaching resources, visit our Internet site at: http://www.history.org/teach

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