Smithsonian Institution
National Museum of American History: Our Story: Life in a Sod House
Imagine moving into a house made out of sod that you and your family had to build in the middle of a prairie! Find great information and activities that will help you understand how it felt to live on the prairie.
Utah Education Network
Uen: Grandma Thinks It's Cake Baking Weather
Second graders understand how daily life has changed over the past 150 years.
US National Archives
Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaching Unit: Pioneer Life With Laura
A great instructional activity using the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder to teach about pioneer life on the plains. Filled with before reading and during reading activities and questions.
Nebraska Studies
Nebraska Studies: Building a Sod House
Here's great information on building sod houses. You can even watch a video of a famous two-story sod house that stood until 1967.
The History Cat
The History Cat: Pioneers on the Plains: Pioneer Living
Describes the struggles that pioneer settlers who established farms on the Plains faced. Without trees, they had to build homes using sod and cow dung. Temperatures were extreme and farms were isolated, making life lonely.
PBS
Wnet: Thirteen: Frontier Life: "Hardship Without Glory": Life on the Trail
From the PBS series, "Frontier House," read about the struggles that pioneers experienced as they made their ways west to new lands via wagon trains.
PBS
Wnet: Thirteen: Frontier Life: Recreation and Leisure Time on the Frontier
Read about how the homesteaders on the American frontier added a little levity to their otherwise harsh frontier life, and in particular how women, how spent much time at home, worked to add variety to their lives. From a companion essay...
PBS
Wnet: Thirteen: Getting Started: Packing and Preparing for a New Life
From the PBS series, "Frontier House," learn about how potential homesteaders prepared to move their families and their lives to homesteads in Montana in the late nineteenth century.
PBS
Wnet: Thirteen: Largest Agricultural & Environmental Miscalculation in Amer History
From the PBS series, "Frontier House," this essay examines "the myth and legacy of the frontier." The writer strongly suggests that within the next one or two generations, much of the land which homesteaders settled in the late...
PBS
Wnet: Thirteen: Frontier Life: Frontier Education and the One Room Schoolhouse
See how much public education has changed from the one-room schoolhouse days of the frontier. From a companion essay to the PBS series, Frontier House.
PBS
Wnet: Thirteen: Frontier Life: Food on the Frontier
Would you clean your plate if you had to eat what frontier families served in eastern Montana? Find out what's on the menu from this companion essay to the PBS series, Frontier House.
PBS
Wnet: Thirteen: Frontier Life: Creating a Home on the Frontier
Making a house a home was a struggle on the plains. This companion essay to the PBS series, Frontier House, describes the problems with getting water, outhouses, and furnishing the sod house.
PBS
Wnet: Thirteen: Frontier Life: "The Little Old Shanty on the Claim"
An essay provided as part of the PBS series, Frontier House, describes the housing options of pioneers on the prairies in eastern Montana.
US National Archives
Herbert Hoover Presidential Library: Pioneering Journeys of the Ingalls Family
Growing up in the late 1800's was not an easy life, especially when your family was always on the move searching for a farm. Laura Ingalls Wilder led a challenging childhood of moving often and falling on hard times. Trace her journeys...
Other
Kansas Collection Books: Emigrant Life in Kansas
This site is a textual copy of a book written by an Englishman, Percy G. Ebbutt entitled Emigrant Life in Kansas, published in 1886. The book focuses on a young man's experiences on the prairie in Kansas. Written for an English audience.
Wikimedia
Wikipedia: Barn Raising
Article discusses barn raising in relation to the preparation that went into it before work began, its importance within a community, and the social pressure to participate.