Travel&Vacation

Taking the Kids

Move over Pilgrims, it’s time to give Jamestown its due, including the youngest settlers. May 14, 2007, marked the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, and it was celebrated with great fanfare—even Queen Elizabeth II came calling. And the celebrating throughout “America’s Historic Triangle” will continue throughout the year.

There are new interactive indoor and outdoor exhibits and programs that expound on Pocahantas’ story and more. “The idea is to learn by experience,” explains Anne Price-Hardister, who oversees education programming for Jamestown Settlement and Yorktown Victory center. Here, kids learn about the African-American, Native American, and English settlers’ experience.

For example, kids can dig out a Powhatan canoe; try on battle armor; climb into a sailor’s bunk on the recreated
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(the ships that brought settlers here); play corncob darts; or make rope or corn cakes. They can even try trading with those who can’t speak their language or understand their culture, and see for themselves what archaeologists have unearthed at historic Jamestowne, the site of the original fort.

Nearby at Yorktown Victory Center, kids can try on 18th-century clothes and crawl into a tent, visit the surgeon (check out the tools for pulling teeth) at the recreated Continental Army Encampment, or help out in the garden at the 1780s farm. Next time the kids gripe about making their beds or doing their homework, remind them how hard they would have had to work if they’d grown up on a colonial-era farm.

You can also visit the Yorktown Battlefield and Visitor Center. The siege of Yorktown effectively ended the Revolutionary War.

Less than 10 miles away at Colonial Williamsburg, once the capital of the most influential state of the 18th century, kids can travel back in time to the eve of the American Revolution in the richest, oldest, and largest colony. They’ll learn what it was like to be a kid in the 1700s, be they slave, gentry or farmer, and can interact with junior interpreters as they play games (hoops anybody?), work in the fields, or march with the army.

Visitors can do everything from make bricks, feed animals, cook, go to a ball, or work as a carpenter’s assistant. “Young people learn a lot easier from people their own age,” says former fourth-grade teacher Katrina White-Comissiong, who works at the interactive Great Hopes Plantation site at Colonial Williamsburg. Here youngsters can talk to the young interpreters about what it was like to be a young slave as they join them in the fields, make toys, or stir pots of hominy.

For visitors planning an extended-weekend or midweek trip, you’ll be able to save: Stay four nights at a Williamsburg hotel and get free length-of-stay tickets.

“Teaching kids history is not easy,” acknowledges White-Comissiong. “Here you can show them that history can be fun.”

See you in the vegetable garden!