By the Shores of Silver Lake - Final

This is our final post about By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We finished the book recently and completed our pending projects.

J is working through the notebook pages that I created to go along with The Prairie Primer unit on By the Shores of Silver Lake. I was hesitant to post these pages until J finished them but I think they turned out great. She liked that they had more lines for her to write and she wasn't overwhelmed with a ton of mini books to go-along with the chapter readings.

One of my favorite pages was the recipe page with the mason jar recipe card for Dried Applesauce (link below). This turned out cute. She wrote a letter and a menu for the Christmas dinner. We also made a menu for the New Year's Dinner because it was so memorable to Laura.

It took a while for our next project to come because I was so late in ordering them. I wasn't sure J truly wanted to do this but I went ahead anyway. We dissected cow eyes. We briefly learned about the eye at the beginning of the book. This is the book that talks about Mary's blindness. J really didn't want to try this but I felt like it was an important part to her science learning for the series, so I finally ordered them.

This picture sums it up - Kaleb loved the cow eye and wasn't afraid to touch it at all and J, well....not so much. They both, however, kept their lenses from the eyeball in a ziplock bag to show their friends!

One last project was to make apple butter. The book mentions dried applesauce but J is not a big fan of applesauce so I gave her the option of making apple butter. I found a simple recipe for the crock pot (link below).

J was afraid to try it but in the end, she loved it. So did Kaleb and Riley! They promptly ate half a loaf of bread toasted with apple butter on it! So, we are finished with By the Shores of Silver Lake and we are ready to move on to The Long Winter. See you soon.

Links

All Recipes - has the recipe for the apple butter in the crock pot.

Little House Books - has the recipe for the dried applesauce.

Home Training Tools - has the cow eyeball dissection kit that we used but I must warn you the size of the eyeballs differed greatly.