Four years ago, Rightfully Ours was just ready for publication. This month I'm taking a look back at my first post about this middle grade history of women's suffrage in the United States.
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Which leads to my new book, Rightfully Ours: How Women Won the Vote with 21 Activities. Reviews are out, and it’s been gratifying to see that a year of hard work -- and planning and writing up 21 themed, hands-on activities -- has gotten positive reviews. Here’s one:
Activities, which make the suffragist years come alive, are educational and fun and related to chapter materials. Included are detailed instructions for making soap and an oil lamp, making and wearing a corset, china painting, and designing suffragist postcards and signs.
And another:
The only downside is the activities, which range from slightly silly (dress up like an ancient Greek for suffrage!) to simply wrong (cake mix does not taste as good as a cake made from scratch).
The second review left me scratching my head. Yup, I rely on cake mix in an activity in Rightfully Ours. It’s “Bake a Cake for Suffrage” iced with a recipe from the Woman Suffrage Cook Book (1890). After all, today’s parents have little time to ferret out some of these 19th century recipes, so I figured making icing from scratch on the stove was good enough. But it was the reviewer’s take on the dress-up activity that made me wonder whether s/he had read the whole book.
The second review left me scratching my head. Yup, I rely on cake mix in an activity in Rightfully Ours. It’s “Bake a Cake for Suffrage” iced with a recipe from the Woman Suffrage Cook Book (1890). After all, today’s parents have little time to ferret out some of these 19th century recipes, so I figured making icing from scratch on the stove was good enough. But it was the reviewer’s take on the dress-up activity that made me wonder whether s/he had read the whole book.
Suffragists did indeed dress up like Greek goddesses when they staged a “tableau” on the Treasury Department steps. And I assure you that the little girl who served as my student helper thought it was pretty cool -- she was all excited about making the laurel wreath.
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Besides, when you look back on your days in school, which do you remember most: all those hours of desk work, or the special projects you made at home or built in school?
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