Scandinavia Thematic Unit

We finished our Scandinavia unit last week. We studied it through art, geography, history, geology, bushcraft, nature-study and reading.

We finished our study of Norway with some Norwegian inspired Christmas decoations.

We learnt a little about fjords

Norwegian animals

And we spent a whole morning learning about polar bears, including listening to polar bears snoring and feeding.

Finland is not on the Scandinavian peninsula so is not considered by some to be part of Scandinavia. However we included it in our studies and we started with Finnish pancakes.

Finland is the home of winter sports so we had fun with winter sports bingo.

And winter sport worksheets left over from our Helsinki Winter Olympics project.

Finland is also the home of the sauna. For its 5.4 million strong population, Finland has 3 million saunas. It also has interesting innovations to bring in the tourists, like heated streets to keep away the snow. The kiddies spent a while coming up with their own ideas to keep Finland warm!

Finnish Lapland is beautiful! We watched some stunning videos and made some fun posters.

Hilarious Norwegian Gnomes

Norway. Our third Scandinavian country. Its name derives from 'Nor-weg' which means 'North Men'.

We watched a fascinating documentary on the beautiful fjords of Norway. The children have Norwegian ancestry so this was particularly special. 

We made some ridiculous Norwegian gnomes because we home-school and we can do these things!

Like Sweden, Norway is also home to the brown bear.

Half of Norway is forest (The Boy loved this fact) and Lynx are predators of the North Norway forests.

The Boy noted this in his Scandinavian scrapbook and drew this amazing Lynx from a YouTube tutorial. Clever Boy!

Panda Girl's lynx is equally smashing.

And Monkey Girl put one of her many Deadly Sixty annuals to good use! I love it. 

Denmark Part II and Greenland

We learnt a little about the Danish gods and how they related to each other. Monkey Girl made a clay Freyja, Valkerie, and Troll.

The Boy painted a Dwarf and Loki - part god, part giant.

And Panda Girl drew some brilliant pictures of them all.

I made the Boy some literacy and numeracy books about trolls

And he checked out Denmark on Google Earth. This is him finding Danish Lego Land!

Monkey Girl read the others the biography of Hans Christian Anderson

And they made stained glass window pictures of some of his fairytales, Thumbelina and The Ugly Duckling.

The Little Mermaid

Hans Christian Anderson used to cut pictures for his audiences as he was telling his fairytales. We used this idea to make a huge snowflake to represent his story, The Snow Queen.

We broke it down into simple steps and it turned out really well. Go team!

Panda Girl made this for fun. I love it.

Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is self-governing but relies on Denmark for defense and trade.

Most of Greenland is within the Arctic circle and therefore is a great place to see the Aurora Borealis. We learnt how the sun gives off solar flares but the earth's own magnetic field (due to its molten iron core) deflects most of this solar wind. However, these magnetic fields are weakest at the poles and some particles make it through the magnetosphere, where they excite the oxygen and nitrogen in earth's atmosphere. This reaction creates light. The colours vary depending on the quantity of nitrogen or oxygen and how high or low the reactions occur. 

They made some beautiful art with pastels and coloured card while we listened to relaxing music and watched videos of the Northern Lights.

And we ended the morning with Aurora Borealis face painting.