How to Train your Dragon, Viking Feast

I LOVE unit studies, love, LOVE, big pink puffy heart loooooove unit studies. I could, and have gotten lost in them. Remember when we studied birds for three months? I still plan to use the more in depth, longer studies. But, I wanted our family to have a smaller, hands on units once a week to celebrate whatever we were currently learning. It is so fun. To make it work it has to be simple, easy and doable on a weekday night.

Tonight we had our viking feast for our little "mini unit" on How to Train your Dragon. We read the book and Daddy took the kids to see the movie this morning while I was at a medical appointment.


For our menu:

• Non alcoholic mead (because Brian draws the line for historical accuracy at liquoring the kids up. although... they might sleep good that night)
• root beer (we are vikings after all, must have the drinks flowing)
  
• beef stew with root veggies
• Jarlsberg cheese
• brie on rye bread
• stewed fruit and yogurt
• gluten free pancakes with Cherry fruit sauce
• a chocolate bunny (vikings did eat rabbit, just probably not chocolate ones.. but this is what happens when CVS extra care bucks meet the Easter clearance aisle).
  

For the non alcoholic mead: take a sliced lemon, a cup of honey and throw it in a saucepan or teapot, sprinkle it with cinnamon and pour 3 cups of boiling water over. Let it steep for a few minutes, then strain it and chill it.

The stew: I bought a package of stew seasoning and threw it in the crock pot. I was careful to use only root veggies like carrots and turnips, but not potatoes, the vikings didn't farm them.

stewed fruit: I threw a frozen package of mixed berries into my smaller crock pot and let it cook on low

cherry fruit sauce: I took a container of cherry jam, added some apple juice to thin it and heated it in a saucepan.


I managed to score some bamboo plates (the vikings would have used wood) at Whole foods. I was so excited, obviously in a mini unit I am not going to go crazy over historical accuracy, but it was a nice touch. The viking hats are available in the party goods section of Walmart right now because of the movies release. Emma wanted to dress up like a dragon, and those pajamas are available there too.


Our activities and printables:

• you can print out the game "viking voyages" here
• the how to train your dragon site is here with lots of online games.
• make a viking shield out of aluminum pizza pans here
• BBC's kids viking site with games and just a ton of cool info is here
• we made a viking longboat with directions here
• we made a viking paper doll with the printables here