Mrs. Koster & Mr. Pinchot's Classes Visit Florida's Frontier!

Today, our classes took a trip to Florida's very own frontier! Did you know that Florida HAD a frontier? Sometimes, we think of a "frontier" as being only related to the wild west, but that isn't true. Did you know that a frontier is actually an underdeveloped area open for a field of discovery? We got the chance to step back in time, onto the grounds of one of Florida's eleven national parks today... Kingsley Plantation!

Zepheniah Kingsley was the owner of this plantation. The difference between a farm and a plantation is that a plantation has twenty or more slave workers. Each of the Kingsley's slaves was a part of the task system in which they worked the fields of sea island cotton each day. Their task was to pick 70-90 lbs. of sea island cotton! We learned that an adult was considered to be 10 years of age or older... that means YOU friends would be picking 70 lbs. of cotton a day! Then, the seeds had to be picked out by hand. Sea island cotton was a luxury item because it was extremely soft, with long fibers. The Florida climate is the perfect recipe for growing sea island cotton with its swampy, sandy terrain and humid air. However, we also learned that picking sea island cotton is quite different than your usual cotton, because sea island cotton grows in trees and vines up to 7 feet tall! After our tour and scavenger hunt had ended, we enjoyed a nice lunch under the palms on the banks of the river... just another day in the sweet life of a CCE fourth grader! 

Enjoy the pictures of our trip back in time...

Koster and Pinchot Historians... What did you like best about our trip today? What new facts did you add to your historian brain? What vocabulary word did you hear today that we have been studying in ELA this week? Give Mrs. Phillips and Mrs. Nash's classes something to look forward to!