Homeschool Week at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia

We’ve heard wonderful things about the homeschool programs in Colonial Williamsburg  in some of the yahoo groups. For two weeks in September, there are programs especially for homeschoolers. They offered discount tickets for homeschoolers and their families and have lots of programs and experiences geared specifically for kids.   This year we decided to go with some close friends of ours to check things out.

You can spend lots of time seeing how different members of society would have spent their days in the Revolutionary War days.  What was neat was not only were people ‘at work’ in their shops and homes, but there were also people dressed up and roaming the streets — either in carriages or walking along. They kept in character as they spoke to others and interacted with the tourists.

The kids enjoyed getting to see people working in their shops at their various trades:

The Blacksmith

The Printer and Book Binder

The Wigmaker

The Cobbler

Making a Wagon Wheel

Archaeology in Colonial Williamsburg:

We also saw some archaeologists at work.  The woman there said that in the course of their work they came across the graves of two people (the blue tarp area in the back). They determined that these were the remains of slaves. There were several reasons for this. First the orientation of the graves were North-South whereas most burials were East-West.  Also they could tell by the muscle attachments that these were people who had done hard labor. Finally, the teeth were in very poor condition indicating a poor diet.  They told us that the remains are to be relocated and reburied in a new location.

The Governor’s Palace

And all this is not even close to everything on offer!

The week was amazing!  These displays were wonderful and the tradesmen and women all spent time talking with the kids (in character, of course) about what they were doing.  But the thing that made the week AWESOME were all the amazing programs they had specifically for kids.  I’ll talk more about those tomorrow.

Here is the link to our other post about Williamsburg: Hands on Experiences at Colonial Williamsburg

You should also try to visit Jamestown  while you’re there too! It’s about 20-30 minutes away.