Making Quills

One of the kids' favorite thing to do for school is History Pockets.  I purchase mine from Amazon and there are several different books.  Right now we are working on Colonial America.  It's a fun way to incorporate facts or projects about a time we are currently studying.

This is the front of the book:

The picture shows a wooden toy, a Jacob's Ladder.  We made those a little while ago and they were a big hit with the kids.  

From this book we learned how to make our own quills.  It was actually pretty easy and each child made and used their own.

Making our quills was definitely easier than writing with them.  That takes a lot of practice!  You can't press the quill to the paper with too much force or too little.  You can't get too much or too little ink.  There were many splotches and smears.  But it was fun.  The kids loved it and I loved it too.  It felt more like painting than writing.

To make your own quill you just need some feathers (I purchased mine on amazon), sandpaper, water, and of course you need paper and ink.

First, sand one edge of the tip of the feather until it is flat.  Then soak the tip in water for 5 minutes.  Dry the tip and snip a small incision in the tip of the feather - this is suppose to help with the flow of ink into the feather.  And there you have it.  That's it!  Pretty easy, isn't it?

I definitely recommend you check out History Pockets if you have kids around the grade school range. My kids LOVE making them.  It's the fun thing they always want to do, which works well for me because I can say, "If we get all our other schoolwork done we can do History Pockets."  That is usually followed by whoops and screams and jumping from the kids.  We are almost done with Colonial America then we will begin The American Revolution.

It was especially fun to do this project right now because we are studying George Washington and reading about his childhood.  He wrote with quills and was a very good student in pretty much every way including writing.  The kids enjoyed writing the way he did.