Going along with the winter theme, we reviewed "left" and "right" hands, and decorated paper mittens. We also started a poetry journal and included a poem about mittens, and a craft project demonstrating symmetry. We talked about Christmas at the Ingalls house, compared to Christmas at our house (yes, totally off season). Levi also did a write up about a gift he received, he wrote about his surf board.
His handwriting is getting a little better!
Next we talked about Pa's fiddle. In The Little House books, Pa often breaks out his fiddle to play and sing along with. We made a mini fiddle with a rubberband to "pop" while singing "Pop goes the weasel"
In the book, they make maple syrup right from the trees, and have a big party afterwards. We learned about maple syrup making when we studied Vermont, so this was just a review. Mainly we ate maple syrup, on our made from scratch pancakes. We use a dairy free recipe, that you can find here.
He wanted super hero shaped pancakes, but super hero masks was the best I could manage.
At the party, Uncle George played his bugle, so Levi decorated a toilet paper tube, watched a bugle video on youtube and then tried out the bugle calls himself. We also tried square dancing!
Next in the book is spring time, Laura and Mary go to town for the first time, and Laura picks up too any pebbles and her pocket rips! Levi sewed a mini pocket on my sewing machine, and cut out some paper pebbles to put into it.
Another thing they did in the spring time was make cheese. Another activity that we can't actually do because he has a dairy allergy, but we replicated some of the techniques they used.
So part of the process of cheese making involved cutting up the chunk into curds. We did this using some tofu, and a fruit cutter thing I found that works perfectly for this (although not for cutting fruit).
We added a little salt and then put the "cheese" into a clean cloth, and squeezed the "whey" out of it. Put it under a heavy container to squeeze even more out of it (they used to use a big rock for this). Tasted it a while later, it tasted like rubbery, salty, tofu, so not that yummy, BUT he saw how all the water was squeezed out and got a better idea of the process.
And then we made a smoothie with the rest of the tofu - orange, mango, tofu, and some orange juice:
We did a few other small activities and mini books for our lapbook. One about cousin Charly, who was just like the "boy who cried wolf" and ended up stung all over by yellow jackets. Another reviewed what the family did throughout the seasons. And lastly we read a poem about being afraid, and about when Pa thought a stump in the woods was a bear - and talked about being scared. Levi drew his own "stump monster" to go with the poem.
You can find the rest of this unit study here:
This was our first "Big" lapbook based unit study, and I think Levi really got a lot out of it. there were so many activities we could do, just from this one book! I'd love feedback/suggestions if you have any ideas to share.
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