Every year the Ontario Grade 3 curriculum features an extended unit on Canadian pioneers.
Children learn about the various challenges and physical hardships faced by early settlers — food, shelter, climate, predators, disease and isolation. The children learn that clothes fastened sans zippers and velcro, that late-night lighting was a pleasure reserved for the long days of summer and that pioneer children laboured long and hard for the rare luxury that might cross their paths.
But neither was all dark and austere.
To show some of the brighter elements of life in early Canada, our school takes the Grade 3 students to a week of study at Black Creek Pioneer Village, a working farm and 1800’s-era village at Toronto’s northern edge.
The village is typical of those established in south central Ontario between the 1790s and the 1860s. In those days, moving water was the engine that turned the mill wheels of rural Canada, grinding grain and providing a focal point for young communities.
With the mill perched at the side of a stream it wasn’t long before stores, a tavern and a blacksmith shop were built nearby. Houses, churches and a school quickly followed.
On today’s field trip the children learned their maths arithmetic lesson using slates and chalk.
They churned butter, carded wool and patted some sheep.
Tomorrow to the blacksmith’s shop and preparation for a spelling bee.
No plastic allowed in the lunch basket, no heating in the school house — the teacher had to start a fire, no Gore-Tex, no Thinsulate, no polypropylene fleece.
Missy here is wearing my brother’s 1967 woollen sweater, my mother’s shawl, alpaca mittens from South America, an undershirt, long stockings, socks and a mess of thrift store finds.
A new-wave kind of pioneer kid.
My girl.
The Country Mice 
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