TOS Review - Ann McCallum Books - Eat Your U.S. History Homework

  It is always a fun school day when you can find a way to work in a hands on activity or experience. I truly believe these type of activities help children remember concepts better. Also it doesn't hurt when those experiences involve food. My tutoring kids range in age from 11 - 13, all with large appetites, especially for sweets. We were offered the opportunity to use and review, Eat Your U.S. History Homework from Ann McCallum Books, which definitely came under the category of yummy eating in the form of education.       The author of Eat Your U.S. History Homework, Ann McCallum, has a Masters Degree in Education and has lived in very interesting places around the world. She has written other books as well, including; Beanstalk: The Measure of a Giant, Rabbits, Rabbits Everywhere: A Fibonacci Tale, Eat Your Math Homework, and Eat Your Science Homework.   Eat Your U.S. History Homework is 47 pages long and retails for $15.95. We received a hard cover book to review. The book is filled with adorable, colorful illustrations. Eat Your U.S. History includes and Introduction, Kitchen Tips, six recipes with accompanying historical information, History Review, Glossary, and Index. The six recipes include:   Thanksgiving Succotash Colonial Cherry-Berry Grunt Lost Bread Southern Plantation Hoe Cakes Revolutionary Honey-Jumble Cookies Independence Ice Cream   Each recipe comes with a historical page of information for that time in history that the dish was served. The recipe is on a two-page spread including ingredients and instructions (both in written and picture form). The two pages following the recipe contain more information about history and a "side dish", which highlights a person or event from the specified time period.  

 

I have included information about the three recipes the kids enjoyed the most. First up is Revolutionary Honey-Jumble Cookies. Basically what we now know as a Snickerdoodle. It was incredibly interesting to read in this section about how Americans are more fond of Coffee than the English of their Tea. I won't spoil it so that you can go out and get the book. The cookies were gone in a blink of an eye.

 

Independence Ice Cream was a hoot to create. Very creamy and delicious. The kids absolutely loved this activity. Very few ingredients but lots of elbow grease to make it work.

 

The Colonial Cherry - Berry Grunt was also delicious. I originally made this for my kids to try, but some of them are a bit picky. I took most of it over to a family dinner instead and saved just a small portion for the kids the next day. My family devoured their portion and as I thought only one of the students really liked it. I had never heard of creating a cobbler like dish in a skillet, so this was very interesting to create.

 

 

This book could be used in a few different way. In our case many of the history time periods matched up to what we are currently studying, especially Squanto, the first Thanksgiving, and the Pilgrims and Puritans coming over to America from England. My daughter Grace helped me cook the Cherry-Berry dish and I am counting it as part of her Home Ec. credit. With the tutoring students we read all the historical information, discussed the differences in cooking then and now, and of course tasted all the great food. I would really like to check out the Eat Your Math Homework because all my kids hate math and would actually like to eat their math homework sometimes.

 

Cute books! Great recipes! Easy ingredients! Be sure to go check out what all the other reviewers from the Crew thought about their books.