What was life like in Plymouth before all the tourists arrived (although I guess if you ask the Natives, the Europeans were the original pushy tourists)? Children will explore the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts and the Pilgrims who settled there through a multimedia program that integrates slides, discussion and activities to bring the seventeenth century town to life. They will discover where the fort and the first houses were as well as where Hobbamock, the ambassador from the Native leader Massasoit, and his family lived. Children will learn what happened to the town after the seventeenth century and what is there today. Did you know that the lot where the house of Elder Brewster, the Pilgrims religious leader and a one-time post master in England, then became the site of the Plymouth Post Office? Or that the house lot of John Billington, a man who disagreed with Captain Standishs order that all men serve in the Plymouth militia, was later the site of an army recruiting office?

Activities include:

• making a model of a Pilgrim house
• learning how to read documents of early Plymouth to try to solve the puzzle of where the Pilgrims Fort was located
• participating in a Plymouth court session to determine if someone is guilty of an offense-such as working on Sunday or charging too much for buttons
• dressing up like a Pilgrim boy or girl and learning about their jobs

Participants receive both a modern map and a historic reconstruction map of Plymouth so that they may see where the locations of houses and the fort were in what is now downtown Plymouth, Massachusetts. They also receive activity pages with word searches and puzzles and additional seventeenth century activities that they can do at home.