Our exploration of Alaska came about because my sister, Samiah and her family, moved up to Alaska in the fall of 2020. Once there, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor and after surgery, it was discovered that it was an aggressive and fast growing brain cancer.

This unit started out book heavy, but we managed to squeeze in a couple projects for which I’m very happy. I scheduled this unit for a single week. Let’s see how much we can get through. So far we’ve done really well diving into the picture books and starting both the biography and the novel.

For this chalk drawing, I used the book In Search of the Northern Lights as inspiration. I used a few pages from this book which depict a brilliantly colored sky and landscape and I was eager to include it in our unit.

Here’s the chalk drawing we did for our Alaska and Arctic unit. You can see a longer tutorial on the blog post for this unit and on YouTube. First let me tell you about the chalkboard. It’s awesome!!

Join me for this live lesson in which my 9-year-old daughter and I draw illustrations inspired by the book Raven and the Tide Lady. This lesson lasted 45 minutes and only included drawing. We did no written work. We used Faber Castell pastels and then switched to Sargent Art Chalk Pastels.

For this project, I used handmade knitting needles I made during the Handwork Conference. You can find more information about the conference by visiting Waldorf Handwork Educators I used bulky weight yarn by Lamb's Pride in various neutrals. You can find Lamb's Pride at many online vendors, but I frequent A Child's Dream for most of our Waldorf needs.

This was one easy but lengthy project! It did get a bit tedious, but it worked well with all the reading we did with our Alaska and Arctic unit. While I read, my 14-year-old son knit and sometimes, we would switch. I did cast on and bind off for him, though he is capable of doing that one his own and actually retaught his older 22-year-old brother when he made a scarf recently. I also added fringe to the end.

In all my years of homeschooling this past year is the first time we made snowflakes. Living in southern California where it never snows (where we live), we've never done winter projects that involve cold weather and snow.

This is one simple yet beautiful project you can complete in no time, especially if you do the stitching like my 11-year-old son and not like me! We used gold and metallic DMC thread to stitch designs on the wool blend die cut snowflakes using two simple stitches: the running stitch and the back stitch.

I bought this kit when we did our American history units when I put together our unit on California history. We ended up not quite reaching that California history when those history units were over (they'll be revisited again), but I had all the kits.

Opening activities which include games are a family favorite in our homeschool and one of our favorite trivia games is the Professor Noggin's Trivia Cards. Over the years, we started making our own. First with Astronomy Trivia Cards, then Bird Trivia Cards and most recently Bee Trivia Cards.

This is the quickest I've ever decided to put together a unit. I sourced books, put together the unit and did it all within about a month. Part of doing it so quickly or rather being able to complete it in just one week was the fact that we didn't include any projects officially.