Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Unit Study

Can you believe it is almost the end of the year! I cannot! I cannot believe we are well int our 2nd full year of homeschooling. As is typical in the homeschool world, I find myself changing things up a bit here or there. I have lost sight a little bit of what we are doing this for and school got to be a matter of checking off things of a list to say we are "done with school". So I decided I needed to get back to my unit studies based on literature! That's how we had fun and learned just last year, how did we get away from that?

So we wrapped up our study on Shiloh and we are spending December and January reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl.




Here are some activities we will do during our unit study:

•  We will ask our friends on Faceboook to choose their favorite types of candy and graph the answers.
•  This is a great time of year to snag those boxes of chocolate candy. We will of course take this chance to grab some, then have a Chocolate/Candy Tasting Event and decide on our favorites!
• I will print this great set of notebooking pages and activities from Chaos and Clutter http://thechaosandtheclutter.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Charlie-the-Chocolate-Factory-Notebooking-Pages.pdf
• There are some really cute Willy Wonka party decorations over on Pinterest, so I'll do a few of those maybe for when we watch the movies. Of course we will watch the original with Gene Wilder first!

We are barreling through this book by listening to it on CD and they are enjoying it, and we haven't even gotten into the factory yet!

~~Amy

Charlotte's Web Fun

We have been working on "Charlotte's Web" for a week or so now and the boys are loving it. It seems now that we're reading it, we are seeing it everywhere. Spiderwebs in our backyard, pig books in plain sight in the library, finding out today is the birthday of the book being published in 1952, and now I see characters everywhere! I know that's the way life is, those things aren't suddenly there, we are just more aware of them because we are learning about them.

The boys love the book and I'm rather surprised some of the words in the book Harrison doesn't know and stops to ask me what they mean. I was always told he was such a great reader while he was in public school and maybe he is, but these are words he should know. Yet another good reason to homeschool, I'd have no idea he didn't know these words if I didn't take these extra steps! I'm continually amazed at how much they are learning, and how well it is working out!

Here are some photographs from our recent fun! We have some more crafts to do for the book, and an activity pack I printed out. We will wrap it up by of course watching the cartoon version of the book, one of my favorites. 

 We created this little farm sensory barn by adding our barn and animals to our lightbox. We added easter grass for grass and swiped some unused timothy hay from our guinea pigs for the hay for the animals! A little strip of blue felt is the ducks' pond!

 We picked up some little animals from Hobby Lobby and of course had to get Wilbur his own food pail!

 This intricate spiderweb was between our swingset and trees. It was beautiful, I wish I could've gotten better up close pics but it kept swaying in the wind.

 

And just a gratuitous photo of Yoshi the guinea pig, isn't he cute?

I haven't read the book in years and it's still a wonderful, easy read for kids, and my boys are enjoying me reading it aloud. Since we will also be going on a field trip next week to a pumpkin patch on a farm, this ties in wonderfully!!




Long Live Wilbur!

~~Amy