Additional Children's Activities

• Carry a bucket of water.
• Identify Aesop’s fables with lessons Lincoln seemed to adopt to read and discuss.
• Invite a dancer to the library to teach the Virginia Reel and other frontier dances.
• Invite someone to the library to demonstrate cutting wood with an ax.
• Learn about the animals Abraham Lincoln encountered as a boy on the frontier: bears, raccoons, squirrels, and turkeys.
• Make log cabins out of Lincoln Logs, sticks, or rolled paper “logs.”
• Make edible log cabins by “gluing” pretzel rods to milk cartoons with peanut butter or canned frosting and adding crackers or Chex cereal for roof shingles.
• Offer a story hour by candlelight.
• Organize a spelling bee.
• Plant pumpkins or corn and bake a batch of pumpkin cornbread to taste the results!*
• Read Aesop’s fables or stories from The Arabian Nights to experience some of young Abraham Lincoln’s favorite fiction.
• Stitch up a copybook and practice writing in it with a quill pen.*
• Write a letter to someone—with a quill pen!

• Learn to embroider.
• Learn to speak some French.
• Listen to parlor music of the early 1800s.
• Mark a handkerchief with a cross-stitched initial to experience a basic embroidery lesson of the 19th century.*
• Research clothing styles of the early 1800s.
• Read poetry from the early 1800s and write a verse of your own.
• Take a virtual tour of the Mary Todd Lincoln House and write an imaginary diary entry about a day in the life of young Mary Todd.

• Host a strawberry party like the one Mary Todd Lincoln is said to have held.
• Sample some of the indoor pastimes of the Lincoln boys by playing checkers or looking at stereoscope pictures on line.
• Take a virtual tour of the Lincoln house in Springfield