March 8, 2007

Gloria loves to ride her bike. She spent a chunk of time today riding up and down the alley behind the shop getting soaked clear through from the puddles.

This week in history we have been studying the great fire of London in 1666. The fire started when a baker was "stoking his fire and a coal fell out, unnoticed, and began to burn it's way into a stack of brushwood nearby. . . " It quickly spread to the baker's house and someone went to alert the mayor. When the mayor checked out the fire he said, "Pish! A woman could put that out." He was wrong. The fire burned for 3 days and destroyed 4/5 of London. Zach has been reading a very informative book on the side about the great fire and the plague that preceded it and has been filling us in on all kinds of interesting facts (including the origin of Ring-Around-the-Rosie. . . we all fall down [dead]). Our activity this week was to build London and then burn it to the ground. The kids have been preparing all week.

We started by coloring the templates that we will use to build the city:

Each of the kids had their own ideas of what London should look like so I let them have plenty of creative license.


They bounced ideas off of each other:

Zach is building his on a narrow street to demonstrate how the fire easily "jumped" from house to house:

The plan was to "burn London" tomorrow but Gloria finished up tonight and was anxious to see it go up in flames:

We lit a match in the corner to simulate the dropped coal. . .

It started to spread. . .

London reduced to ashes. . .

Tomorrow we'll see how Zach's London fares. . .

On a completely unrelated note. . . the kids are beginning to think like me about this blog! Yesterday I found a box of pictures from Gloria's babyhood and there were several of Zach pushing her around in cardboard boxes. Without any prompting from me (honestly) they got into position and told me to take a picture for comparison purposes for my blog!! They've changed just a bit. . .