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

Penguin Unit Study Wrap Up!

We had a blast this month learning about Penguins! As was with our last theme of Charlotte's Web, it seemed everywhere we turned we found penguins! At the library, the store, online, of course it could've been the frigid time of the year...

We read plenty of short penguin books from the library including the very awesome "One Cool Friend".



We really enjoyed this book and it's very much worth multiple reads because you see many things the second time you didn't see the first. It won a Caldecott Medal in 2013 and it was well deserved, super fun, beautifully illustrated and funny story.

We also read "Mr. Popper's Penguins" as our chapter book and watched the movie with Jim Carrey. I'm very glad we read the book first because the differences between the book and movie were immediate and plentiful. Harrison especially was not happy with the changes. (Good boy! Books are always better!) But it was a good read aloud, and Eli loved when I made the penguin sounds of GORK and ORK!



I made a penguin sensory box one day out of ice cubes, colored water and the Penguin Toobs. We love those little Toobs, can't praise them enough.



The boys had a blast with the box and taking their penguins everywhere. I hope I can keep up with all the Toob's we've purchased so we can reuse them!

We made lots of penguin inspired art of course.

Did a little bit of penguin math....

And of course had to go see the penguins at the Audubon Aquarium! They were very active and happy, and it was awesome to see them up close. We are very blessed to live so near to such an awesome resource. If you aren't near such a great place, you can always see our penguins at www.apl.tv!

I think she liked us....

Either way this was a super fun, great unit that we enjoyed and I think the boys learned a lot from.

GORK!

Stay warm!

~~Amy



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