Building a Log Cabin

We are in the middle of our read aloud chapter book, Little House on the Prairie.

We have had a lot of discussion about the Ingalls family went out west and what happened to the native americans as white settlers started taking over the land.  We recently got to the part where Pa builds their log cabin with his own two hands.

We got out the Lincoln Logs and built some log cabins of our own.

This was a great opportunity to introduce them to Dick Proeneke.  I shared the story of his life and his dream of living off the land in the Alaskan wildnerness.  He built his cabin from scratch using nothing but hand tools, just like Pa!

The DVD called Alone in the Wilderness shows us how he did this, so we can imagine how hard Pa worked just like Dick Proeneke.

If you want to learn more about Dick Proeneke, click here and here.  

As we watched the DVD, we learned that he was a writer (he kept a journal of his adventures) as well as a mathematician (he used lots of math in building his cabin).

Here are some highlights from the DVD.

What intringues you about the life of Dick Proeneke?