Just a little late sharing but… we always make a bit of a fuss. I know that we should show love and affection year round, which we do. But it is nice to reinforce the need to SHOW this emotion with a month of careful labeling of Valentines, discussion of how to show we care and a slough of themed worksheets! Which I will share some links to, of course. 

We have a few traditions we do each year. Pictures in red and white clothes, of course.

A red and white lunch… this gets tricky as I don’t like to make the same thing every year. This year I splurged on Swedish pancakes, strawberry jam and chocolate from IKEA, heart shaped cakes, strawberries and whipped cream, those awful candies with words on them and pink lemonade. 

We spend half the day crafting. This coincided with our once a year (at least) request to decorate t shirts. I don’t force a theme on those but let them go wild. This year I picked a new set of rainbow thinner point markers and Gavin proved that they were a rather smart buy. 

With older kids now (oh my the twins are 13!!!) we are able to leave them to their own devices from time to time. So Ken and I made them walking tacos and rented the movie Storks for them, snuck out and went to Khan’s Mongoli Grill for the first time in FOREVER. We ate way too much and had a lovely time. 

When we got home it was time for cake! Yup, full on spoiling of the kids this year. 

Ken and I didn’t really exchange gifts. He says I cheated because I made him this heart.

I had to laugh as earlier in the week he offered me some shopping on Amazon. It just happened to show up on Valentine’s Day. So BAM my present. 

The kids got some Valentines in the mail, and exchanged with each other. We put the fairies and Hello Kitty Aunty Holly sent us out for decoration and had to have a fashion show of the new tops from Gammie.

All in all a fun day! I just hope our mailed Valentines make it to everyone. Poor Ken had a few trips to the post office this month!!! Now for the worksheets!

Activity Village has a whole section for Valentines – they have gone to a pay format but it is so worth it HERE

My collection that includes past years choices on Education.com HERE

EnchantedLearning (also pay for) HERE

Just a quick note – Activity Village has gone to membership, we found it rather reasonable and so paid in. This means I will still be posting their links. Some things are free, I will try to remember to indicate what is in the future! 

I let the twins chose a unit study for history to start out their new year. This has been a mixed success as the time it took to work on this unit was longer than expected and had us running into seasonal projects. So I do need to work on amping up our time on US history and ignoring some of the softer “fun” topics.

I looked all over for a good free lapbook resource to no avail. So we splurged and got a lapbook from Currclick – Slavery in North America by Hands of a Child. It was worth every penny!

Of course I requested books from the library:

• Freedom From Slavery by Brianna Hall
• Slavery: The Struggle for Freedom by James Meadows
• Many Thousands Gone by Virginia Hamilton
• Frederick Douglass by Suzanne Slade
• Slavery in the United States by Rebecca Rissman
• Passenger on the Pearl by Winifred Conkling

Instead of covering Thanksgiving once again and going into massive detail on a first meal that may or may not (most likely NOT) happened as it has been repeated along with all sorts of cultural issues we focused on one thing this year – The Mayflower. We decided to make a fact poster and still do a few fun Thanksgiving themed worksheets.

We used the following library books:

• You Wouldn’t Want to Sail on the Mayflower (A Trip That Took Entirely Too Long) by Peter Cook
• The Mayflower Compact by Judith Lloyd Yero
• Mayflower 1620 by Plimoth Plantations
• We also requested, but did not get to – The Mayflower and the Pilgrims’ New World by Nathaniel Philbrick which looked rather interesting.

For worksheets do check out Activity Village’s Thanksgiving sheets HERE, Education.com has my Thanksgiving folder HERE and EnchantedLearning is a great help HERE (this is a link to my search results). I would suggest lots of google searches but those are my three go to sites (some membership fees to access everything are required for Education.com and EnchantedLearning).

Our Mayflower fact poster

How we miss you! And how the boys asked so politely to do a FULL unit on you. And with that… time to share our resources!!! It is mostly a book like, but I figured… time to get this puppy posted. Remember to research interesting topics… I would suggest the following:

• Inukshuks
• First Nations
• Beavers
• Dinosaurs
• RCMP
• Kermode Bear
• The “new” Territories
• Canada Geese
• Poutine
• Maple Syrup

The list goes on! Good luck and enjoy.. eh.

BOOKS (and there are a few!)

• Canada by Julie Murray (Explore the Countries)
• Only in Canada by Vivien Bowers
• Honk, Honk, Goose! (Canada Geese Start a Family) by April Pulley Sayre
• Lucy Maud Montgomery by Alexandra Wallner
• Grasslands Inside Out by James Bow (this has a  couple pages on the Canadian Prairies and discusses what an ecosystem is)
• Cultures of the World: Canada
• Getting to Know… Nature’s Children Beavers by Merebeth Switzer
• Canada by Liz Sonneborn
• On the Tundra by Jen Green (Small Worlds)
• The Canadian Forces Snowbirds by Lora Polack Oberle (this is one we didn’t get to, I ended up having to cut some of our topics to deal with the fact it IS summer… but interesting all the same!)
• Coming to Canada by Susan Hughes (We did not read this book through either, I really would like to re-request this one and read it myself!)
• Countries of the World: Canada by Brian Williams (an older book but very good resource)
• A Visit to Canada by Mary Quigley
• Canada by Karen Latchana Kenney
• Igloos by Jack Manning (and the kids are back to planning on building their next igloo this winter… boy do they hope there is more snow than last winter!)
• History of the Great Lakes by Emily Jankowski
• The Inuit by Kevin Cunningham and Peter Benoit
• Across Canada by Jeff Sinclair
• Canada’s Arctic Animals by Chelsea Donaldson
• A is for Algonquin by Lovenia Gorman
• M is for Maple by Mike Ulmer
• Polar Animal’s Dictionary by Scholastic
• Goose’s Story by Cari Best
• Ituko An Inuit Child – Children of the World
• Winnie – The True Story of the Bear Who Inspired Winnie the Pooh by Sally M. Walker

DVD

• Families of Canada from the Families of the World series. The link is to the 2015 version. We had the 2005 one from the library.

USEFUL SITES (quick links to their Canada resources… good luck!)

• Kidzone HERE
• SuperTeacher Worksheets HERE
• Today I Found Out (on the flag) HERE
• FactSlides.com HERE
• Teachers Pay Teachers Freebie HERE
• EasyScienceForKids worksheet HERE
• ISLCollective has some worksheets HERE

Of course we used Activity Village for resources and did lots of colouring. Education.com has a bit, HERE is my collection. It is well worth it to do a search on dinosaurs found in Canada. We used to live near the Royal Tyrrell Museum which is an amazing dinosaur museum with some very new finds. Do check out their site HERE. Macleans also has a 10 coolest dinosaurs article to get you started HERE. Check out Global’s piece on a new dinosaur find HERE.

It is really past time for me to post this! So I am glad to get it up. I am sure we will cover our homeland once again in 2017. With it being a landmark year (150) I will try to find some interesting ways to learn even more about Canada in all her glory. Wish me luck!