Grade 3 – Week 14

Country: Norway

Science: Forests

Bible Verse:

Matthew 5:45


That you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the eveil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.


We have moved on to Europe and our first stop is in Norway. For our craft we made a Lapland Felt Square. I didn’t have quite the exact colors of felt so it is not quite “authentic”.

The girls have had lefsa before so we tried a different food – Fruit Soup. Basically you take dried fruit and cook it in sugar and water with tapioca until it becomes more of a pudding texture. Now if we had made about 1/8 of this recipe, it would have been okay. But there was enough to feed a crowd and while everyone tasted it, no one was demanding seconds, adults included. But the girls had fun selecting which dried fruit to include (I let them taste different kinds) and weighing it to get the correct amount.

Since there are no exciting animals unique to Europe, we are studying grasshoppers, mosquitoes, moths, tuataras, crocodiles, alligators, and other insects.

We also did an experiment that we had skipped earlier. Did you know that the shape of an egg is one of the sturdiest and strongest shapes in architecture? We cut the top off of four eggs – trying to get them close to the same size. Next we placed the eggs cut-side down in a rectangular pattern. We than placed books on top to see how much weight these four egg shells could hold. It was quite fun to guess. We started out with paperbacks and ended up taking them off and using heavier books. At 14 lbs, our’s started to crack. Had they been the exact same height, I think we would have gotten more weight on as the shortest one cracked first.

We are also studying northern forests. The MN forestry organization sent me some cool free stuff available upon request. We have some posters, samples of woods, some lesson plans, as well as a paper making kit. We incorporated most of these extra lessons into our program.