The New Schoolhouse

Jamie Really Liked to Eat shows the life of a young boy living on a homestead around 1830 and how many pioneer parents depended on their children to help them gather and prepare the family's food. Jamie fishes, plucks ducks, and traps rabbits. He helps his mother churn butter, collect eggs and bake bread. Children can compare the food Jamie eats with the food they eat - some of it the same, like buckwheat pancakes and blueberry muffins, and some of it different, like rabbit stew and duck pie.

Set in Manitoba in the 1890s, the story traces an Ontario farm family as they move west in search of cheap land. They experience travel on the recently completed CPR, build a sod house, battle a prairie fire and celebrate their first harvest.

Emily uses more than ten different forms of transportation to travel from her home in pioneer Ontario and meet her cousins in Quebec in the 1850s. She paddles a canoe, rides a horse, drives a farm wagon and guides a timber raft as she takes a number of days to complete a journey that would be no more than an afternoon's drive today. Part of a series of children's pioneer stories.

The New Schoolteacher describes the life of Ella, a young teacher in the 1850s. Not much older than the senior students in her charge, she is responsible for everything in the school from teaching all grades, all subjects, to discipline and housekeeping. It is a difficult job but Ella proves that she can do it and starts a baseball team too.

Woolly's Gift takes youngsters step by step through the making of fabric for Annie's new dress. Students see Annie and her family shear Wooly, a mother sheep, and wash the wool. They see the wool carded, spun into yarn, dyed and woven, how leftover wool was bartered, and the daily activities of a pioneer girl.