Our homeschool year runs from January to September, so while everyone else is gearing up to head back to school, we are in the home stretch and gearing up for a nice long break! One thing we did this year was have Taryn (3rd grade) and Jude (1st grade) keep what we call a “Curious Journal”. I purchased them from Lakeshore Learning and it’s a place for them to write and draw and keep track of all the things they are curious about. It’s been really interesting to see what they write and what they want to learn. It helps me to know what direction to head in when we have a little extra time to learn something new outside of what is included in our Timberdoodle curriculum. We do some unit studies and I try to pick one topic from their Curious Journal a month. Jude has been super in to Penguins over the last year so I thought I’d come share our unit study on them several months ago (but I’m just getting around to blogging). We didn’t purchase everything listed below, but we did do a lot of it. I highly recommend checking out the library or Half Price Books to try and save some money. We read a lot of books, played games, watched documentaries and movies, searched youtube for penguins, watched live feed penguin cams, made a sensory bin, did penguin craft projects and more. Below are a few resources we used for our studies!

Books
I Wonder Why Penguins Can’t Fly (fave)
If You Were A Penguin
365 Penguins (Jonah’s fave)
How Do Penguins Play?
Penguin & Pinecone
Penguin Say Please
Penguin
10 Little Penguins Pop-up
Penguins (Smithsonian)
National Geographic Penguins
Penguin Chick
Your Personal Penguin

Sensory Bin
Penguins TOOB
Bucket of Penguins & Iceburgs (we didn’t buy this but if you are building a larger sensory box, it may be more cost effective than buying multiple TOOBs)
Plastic bin or other sensory box
Glass beads from the dollar store
White cotton balls from the dollar store
Various blue pom-poms
Small hand scoops from Party City

Games
Penguins on Ice (our fave)
Pengoloo
Penguins on Ice Math Activity Set
Pop ‘n Drop Penguins
Penguin Race
Happy Feet Two Fishing Game

Crafts
Heart Penguin Craft (you can see our project here)
Waterbottle and cotton ball penguins (you can see our project here)
Hand Tracing Penguin Craft
Easy Paper Roll Penguin Craft
Penguin Paper Craft
Paper Roll Penguin With Crazy Hair
Learning Shapes with Penguins
Paper Mache Igloo
Marshmallow Igloo
Cotton Ball Igloo