Westward Ho!

The Oregon Trail -- what an adventure!

The Navigators and the Pioneers got to experience some of the excitement of traveling the Oregon Trail first-hand in our Westward Ho! Oregon Trail simulation. It took us weeks, and we suffered through perilous terrain, difficult decisions, and unfortunate circumstances, but we persevered, and finally made it to the end of the trail. Read on to find out a bit of what we experienced:

We started off by learning a lot about wagons and the types of things people packed for life on the trail and to start their new lives out west. We got a Pioneer kit from the Job Carr Cabin Museum that had model wagons and dollhouse-sized furniture and supplies, and we spent an afternoon thinking about what types of things we would need for our journey and practicing packing them into our wagon models.

Then we had to do some math. First, we did a little research about the two main types of wagons people used; Conestoga or regular covered wagons. We figured out the area and perimeter of each type, again discussing what types of things we would want to bring and what we could pack into the different sized wagons.

Then we had to use our budget to buy our wagons and supplies. We worked in groups, and had to learn to cooperate with our trail-mates in order to decide as a group which supplies we most needed and how much we would spend or save for the trail.

We also read a lot of books about life on the trail to prepare ourselves for the journey, just as actual trail blazers would have done. We chose old-fashioned names and created back stories for our wagon-mates, thinking about all the reasons people had for deciding to make the trip and coming up with our own stories.

Finally, when we had everything prepared, we circled the wagons for the first time, and prepared to head west...