Earth Trip : Norway

A friend and I got chatting at the end of last year and decided our boys needed more geography in their educational diet. We talked about various things we could do, but how to make it fun and appealing to a 6yo and and 8yo who are Lego/Star Wars obsessed?

Well she came up with the idea of having a story where a boy is trying to win a trip to the moon, but before he can go he has to do a tour of the Earth and complete several missions en-route!

So we started our first mission 2 weeks ago, to Bergen in Norway.

Here are some of the things we covered:

Made a passport

Located Norway on the Globe and the World map and marked our starting point.

We read about Scandinavian Sami people from the Children Like Me book.

Talked about fjords and had a look at some photos. We put these in our travel scrapbook

Did some map work locating different points.

Did a country fact sheet finding out what languages are used, currency, population size etc.

Learnt how to say "hello" in both Norwegian and Sami

We read about 'Lefse' a kind of Norwegian pancake and made some and ate them for lunch, yummy! We then put the recipe and photos in our World Recipe Book.

We read a book on orcas and did a quiz to see how much we had learnt. We also did some simple experiments about buoyency.

For another little science project we made a 'floating killer whale' using magnets. You can't tell from the photo but the whale is fixed to the bottom of the box using thread. You then place a strong magnet on top of the box, which attracts the paper clip, making the whale appear to float.

We made the Norwegian flag in HAMA beads.

We read several books on Vikings, THIS was a particular favourite. One of the things we read about was how the Vikings preserved their meat and fish using salt. We found out the Vikings got their salt from boiling up sea water, so we got our own "sea water" and boiled it up on the hob until all the water had evaporated.

We then did a simple Viking craft from here

We finished up the week by doing a Viking skills task which was all about weighing and estimation.

We've had lots of fun with this, on to Russia next!