India Unit...

When I was trying to figure out a curriculum to use if we started homeschooling again, I knew I wanted to try doing unit studies.  I have read  that this is the easiest way to school multiple ages, and if this all works out and we pull Miss A from school too, that will be an issue.  I thought I would make up my own units, but then some one on the area homeschool facebook group mentioned this book.


Basing our units on geography appealed to me, since we had already done an extracurricular geography club while we lived in Guam.  We decided to study India first, since there is a big Indian festival coming up.

We colored a map page of India from this book:

which only costs three dollars and is really great, as most stuff from Dover is...

We did some sticker pages on Indian costumes from some Usborne sticker doll books, Miss M really likes pretty sparkly clothes, so I knew this would be a good way to get her hooked.

I had her make a fact sheet on elephants, tigers, and the country itself.

She made these by going through the stacks of books on these subjects that we got at the library.

Miss M also did a lot of reading of these books to her little sister, and I picked some words from these books to make vocab/spelling cards.

We quizzed on the locations of the continents, oceans, India, Arabian Sea, and Bay of Bengal.
We watched The Jungle Book, a show on Netflix called Born to Explore, season 1 episode 7 about India, and the last part of Nature: Moment of Impact, Jungle, about a tiger jumping up on an elephant.  Also on Netflix is Tiger: Spy in the Jungle, which all the girls really liked.  It shows great footage of baby tigers.

We also went to the zoo and saw the EVER so cute baby tigers.

 
 
The zoo had an intern teaching about the tigers and answering questions, so the girls got to hold a tiger tooth and a lion tooth and learn about things influencing tiger habitat loss, like palm oil production.

B helped the girls make some paneer cheese, very fun and tasty.

And we used these books:


to make an Indian feast.

In preparation, I cleaned out my spice cupboard, and gave the girls all my outdated spices.  You know, the ones that have made the last five or so moves with us...  They mixed their own curries, which we learned means each family's signature spice mixture that they make for their own dishes.

The smell of lemon grass was pretty thick in the air that day...

Then last night we had our feast.

We had dhal, raita, naan, rice, and chicken tikka.  It was super tasty!  Tomorrow we go to the festival and get some legit Indian food.