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
  

Bird Unit wrap up

We have wrapped up our bird unit. We really enjoyed the unit, we learned alot and made quite a few memories.

We have recently added time for learning, an online program for math and language arts to our curriculum.

We took last week and part of this week off from our unit studies to take a bajillion completely unrelated field trips.

I believe that our next unit study according to KONOS would be Light. But we might take a quick break to study domestic animals briefly. Lately the kids have been very interested in keeping track of the cat and the dogs. Well, and practically speaking, we need to put some time into training our dog... you know, two birds.... one stone....

Birds at the zoo

We got a special treat when we were looking at the birds in the zoo. The kookaburra bird did his famous laugh for us. It was awesome! We sang the kookaburra song through the zoo after that for quite a while.

Bird watching on Bolivar Penninsula

Today we went bird watching. We saw some loons, a ton of seagulls, and pelicans. A sweet little family of Turns entertained us.

All in all we expected to see many more birds, but all the trees were damaged in Ike, so the birds don't have as many places to land.

The focus shifted to seashells, but it was still a blast.

Bird Unit Study, Week 3, day 1

Today we did all our regular work... math, reading, grammer and then we went over cardinals and mockingbirds. Emma and Chloe liked the Cardinals the best. It figures, they are colorful and loud.

The girls also spent alot of time today on Starfall.com

The vultures are circling...

Sounds ominous doesn't it? Last week we took off for Spring Break, but as it happens we did have a school lesson. We were driving out of our subdivision when we came across these vultures. A bunny had died in the road and they were "cleaning" it. We have so many rabbits in our subdivision I am convinced we must be sitting on top of a massive warren. So we stopped and watched. (I know, its a bit gorey, but it was very educational). I spared everyone pics of the corpse, but got these great photos of the vultures on our light pole. They aren't the prettiest, but they are huge. The kids were really impressed when the birds flew so close to us and ate the bunny.

Today was our day to study vultures, and of course everyone reminisced about the ones we had seen. We did our math and our phonics/reading/grammer. We are trying to take it somewhat easy, and heal up. Somehow we have wound up AGAIN with this stupid cold/virus whatever it is. So we did alot of starfall.com today too.

Bird Unit Study, Week 1, Day 4: Interesting Bird Videos

KONOS Bird Unit Study: Week 1, Day 2

Ummm, today was pretty much a bust. We had scouts, and that was awesome. We learned about manners. But we didn't do anything "birdy". After scouts we spent a good 2 hours at the doctors office and now I am on some antibiotics, and hopefully will be feeling better. Downside of homeschooling = there is no substitute teacher to call in when you are sick!!!

Bird Unit Study: Week 1, Day 1

Today was our first day of our new bird unit. We introduced the idea of a report on beaks and bills. Its interesting how fun that sounds before you realize what it is... Then Emma did some internet research on red robins, toucans, hawks and pelicans. We had planning on going on a nature walk today, but I am so sick and there was just no way i was going to make it on a walk without a stretcher. So we drove to Kemah, near the docks and found Pelicans to watch. Then we came home and painted our bird houses. Emma's so proud of her birdhouse because she built it herself at her scouts!!!

During out trip down to Kemah I was excited to see that my local fish mongers are back in business YAY!!!! I LOVE getting my shrimp from them!