Make your history projects look more authentic with this ship’s logbook project

Technically speaking, all of the posts for the next week or so were completed before the Christopher Columbus unit.  I say technically because, it’s all a horrible mish-mash of activities in my head, and some were completed after, and some were before, but I know we started our Ship’s logbook craft before any lessons on Columbus.  Mainly because I remember my entire downstairs floor being covered in papers drying.  The things I’ll put my house through for the sake of our homeschool history lessons….

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Tea-dyeing papers

If you are unfamiliar with this process.  It’s very simple.  First make a batch of good strong tea, 2-3 bags for your pot of boiling water.  Or if you’re not a tea drinker like I am, make a good strong pot of coffee.  We have a divided family, so I had both available, which really helps in the aging process.

1  Crumple up your printer paper* (I actually buy an even bigger box than this).  Smooth it out, and then crumple it up again.  This gives some interesting folds for the tea to sink into.

2. Dip your paper into the tea.  To make this easier we put the tea into one of those 9X13 Pyrex dishes*.  Which in my house have been sitting mostly unused lately since I stopped making so many casseroles.  Leave your paper in for a couple of seconds, until the entire thing is wet.

3.  Carefully carry it over to dry on a towel you don’t mind getting stained.  If you live in an area that isn’t windy they can dry outside.  Our backyard seems to form a wind tunnel, so towels on the floor.  After being married almost 15 years, and having three kids who are hard on EVERYTHING, we have a few towels that are not in the best of shape.  The papers dried on there, and we did our best to keep the dog off the paper as they dried.

4.  Occasionally for a different color, we’d dip a sheet in the leftover coffee, or sprinkle dots onto the paper.

5.  Once the paper is dry, find a big heavy book (in my house it’s the Strong’s Concordance*, I have discovered this is a big downside to having lots of e-books and no longer having phone books, we lack big books to provide weight to press things flat), and drop it on top of your paper to press them a bit flatter.  If you want to go above and beyond the call of duty, you can even iron the paper on low heat, and that will remove more of the wrinkles.  But I think the wrinkles add character, and just wanted them a bit flatter, so it more easily fits the notebook, since I didn’t feel like binding books at home.

Assembling your ship’s logbook

While I was tea-dyeing all of that blank printer paper, I also tea-dyed a few notebooking pages I printed off from Homeschool Share on the Age of Exploration (these were perfect for this Age of Exploration Unit, and will be mentioned a few more times).

I have a comb binder that I generally like to use for projects like this, but the pages were wrinkled enough they did not punch well, so we opted for 3 ring binders, and some dividers (which are a novelty to my kids).  I had a large stash of 3 ring binders with a clear pocket for putting covers in, and the kids happily decorated their notebooks with appropriate nautical themes.

As to the actual contents.  I put in 5-10 sheets of blank paper at the front, for general notes on the upcoming activities.  Then I started putting in the pages for each of the explorers we were going to learn about.  Occasionally I would add a few more blank pages for extra notes, and I included a few maps from Wonder Maps* because I like maps.

What did we use our ship’s logbook for?

Well, all of these activities you’re about to read about for the next several days (you will be back tomorrow, right?  Tomorrow we learn to navigate) needed to be recorded and written down.  They took notes on their ship’s logbook.

The writing assignment you saw last week, you know where we convinced Queen Isabella to pay for Christopher Columbus’ journey, that was in here.  In a few weeks when you hear about our Marco Polo writing assignments, these are in here as well.

It’s all in there, I promise.