"Let's Open the Window" The Mungle Family: My Father's World: Week 1 Vikings

This year we are using My Father's World Adventures for History and Science. I don't think it matters which curriculum we use, I always alter it a bit. So, here's week 1 in review.

Week 1 focuses on the meaning of your child's name. We hid their name all over the house: on the mirror, with blocks, pasta, sidewalk chalk, magnets, stickers, and even string.

Language Arts: Since we're studying names, I thought this would be a great time to review "proper nouns" as well. We pulled out the baby names book and he looked up names of our family and friends. Some of the meanings cracked us up!

Writing an advertisement: Eric the Red strategically chose the name "Greenland" to convince others to come. Assign your child an unlikely vacation destination and see if they can come up with an advertisement that would convince others to come. (This is also a good way to introduce what it means to be "misleading" and how it compares to "deceit.")

Pledge of Allegiance: I came up with this craft when I was teaching third grade in Texas. On one side are the complicated words of the pledge and on the other side are synonyms/ definitions,

Bible connection: while teaching about the pledge, I realized how many

connections there are in the language to our relationship with the Lord:

Pledge- promise
Allegiance- to do good and not harm (plans to prosper you and not to harm you).
Nation- country (people group)
Indivisible (what can separate us from the love of God?)
Liberty- freedom (where the spirit of the Lord is there is freedom)
Justice- fair and right. (For there is no one else like you, a righteous God and Savior).

The only word that didn't connect was "republic." We don't get to vote for representatives to make decisions for us. We are under the rule of a King, yet we have immediate access to approach His throne and petition Him with our requests.

We had an important conversation about taking "under God" our of the pledge, and why people would want that...a good reminder to pray for our country!

Maps: We pulled out our travel brochures and located the compass rose on each of them.

We also played a game where I hid a compass in the room while Jack was blindfolded. After establishing "North" I gave him directions to find the compass. Go South two steps, etc. It was not easy to keep his bearing, because although his direction changed, North did not!

Meanwhile, Callie was looking for shapes....

We used this world map ($2 at the Thrift Store) to learn continents, oceans, and directions. I gave him a pointer and he placed it on our state. I said, "By following my directions you can find the country I'm thinking of." It then told him to North, etc. Then he got to choose a country and give me directions. This was fun!

Leif Erickson: We learned about the Vikings I found this online interactive game that proved to be a fun tool. He asked to play this daily! (Here is another game, although it focuses more around castles.)

Books:


This is a book I wanted to use, but our library didn't have it.

"Voyage With the Vikings" is part of the Imagination Station book series from Focus on the Family, but we weren't able to get a hold of that either.

So, I found a few DK books about ships, and the others are LEGO books. I printed off the types of ships in the picture from a website called Kidssoup.

Here's a fun link to make yourself look like a viking. Just download a picture, follow a couple steps, and be prepared to laugh! I wish I could show you how funny these turned out!

We used this link from Nova to see what our name would look like using the Runes alphabet. Jack made a Rune stone by carving into a bar of soap, but you could also use clay to do this.

(The main purpose of a runestone was to mark territory, to explain inheritance, to boast about constructions, to bring glory to dead kinsmen and to tell of important events. In some parts of Uppland, the runestones also appear to have functioned as social and economical markers and up to 70% of them had Christian inscriptions.) Jack used a pencil to "carve" all of our names with "Rune characters" using the website mentioned above. He also used a paintbrush to clean up the carvings. I was impressed!

Just for fun, here's a video set to music using Legos to reenact Leif's discovery of "Vineland". I watched with him and talked him through a summary/ review of Leif Ericson and the situations he encountered.