Arctic Unit Study

 

I put together this unit study for my boys who were age 4 and 6. The read alouds were more suited to my 6 year old. For this unit study we read books, enjoyed activities, and watched videos. This study should take 4-6 weeks to complete.
We have several spines or text book type books that we use in our study of the world. For the Arctic we used:

1. People Around the World – This book contained a couple pages about the Arctic. We enjoyed the pictures. The reading is a bit above their heads, but I used this book mostly for the pictures and I could read the content on the page and paraphrase in a way they could understand.
2. Children Just Like Me – This book is a wonderful book for young children. It is full of pictures of children around the world and it shows little pictures about the child’s favorite food, school, family, toys, etc. I had purchased this book years before my boys were born. They have enjoyed it for years. For the Arctic we read about 2 different children.
3. Window On The World (pb) – We have a mission focus in our study of the world. This book gives insight into the spiritual needs of different countries. We read about Greenland.

I read a series of books to my boys. My youngest son wasn’t interested in the story, but my 6 year old was able to listen to the stories. Basically they are the story of a missionary couple who went to the Arctic to witness of Jesus. These are chapter books and are good for a child who doesn’t need pictures when listening to a story.

1. Mik-Shrok (Repp, Gloria, Adventures of An Arctic Missionary, Book 1.)
2. Charlie (Adventures of An Arctic Missionary, Book 2.)
3. Zebra 77 (Adventures of An Arctic Missionary, Bk. 3)

I read one or two chapters a day.

We did a variety of fun activities:

1. Make a polar bear out of marshmallows This activity was loads of fun for both of my boys. The polar bears didn’t last long. They were eaten within an hour of their creation.
2. Make a blubber mitten This was a fun, yet messy activity. Read the directions carefully. We didn’t do it correctly, but still had fun.
3. Make a salt map of Greenland. This was fun. Once we created the salt map we painted it and labeled the parts of the country.
4. Paint a flag of Greenland. We painted one entire paper red and cut it in half. We then cut out a half circle of the halved red paper. We then just glued the red pieces on a white paper.

Videos were an important part of the study. We watched several on Youtube, but also watched a couple movies.

1. Arctic Tale – This was a cute movie totally appropriate for my young children. It is a story of animal wildlife in the Arctic.
2. Nanook of the North (1922) – This is a wonderful old movie. It is a silent film of a Inuit/Eskimo family. Since there was no sound we talked about what was happening as the film progressed. My youngest son did not watch the whole film.
3. Inuit Dance on Youtube
4. Inuit Throat Singing on Youtube – This was quite interesting to watch. We did attempt to sing like that, but were unsuccessful.
5. Greenland videos on Youtube. We especially liked this one called a Cold Day in Nuuk.
6. Greenland TV online was interesting. We didn’t understand the language, but enjoyed watching the news and seeing what was important to people in that part of the world.

 

So how do you use all this? I pretty much started out with a text book as an introduction and then started with the read alouds. There was no set schedule. The activities and videos were interspersed throughout our study. I didn’t find any readers that would suite my son for this topic so we used other readers while we were studying the Arctic. I did have my son do some language arts activities like writing a story about polar bears during our study.