The Ice Age Unit Study

We have never done an Ice Age unit study before, so I was quite excited to be learning alongside the children.  I decided to invest in a couple of extra resources to make the whole lesson more informative and interesting.  As a result, it was a light-hearted and fun lesson: just how I like it 😉

Book We Read During Our Ice Age Unit Study

As always, I read the Mystery of History lesson about the Ice Age first.  This was an interesting read, and focused mainly on how the Ice Age fits into the Biblical time-line, and is thought to be the result of the Noah and the Flood.

Since the Ice Age is not clearly mentioned in the Bible, we did not focus on any specific verses, nor did we read any of our usual books accompanying the Bible.  We did, however, read a few books together:

The ‘Ice Age’ was excellent.  Lots of short paragraphs for the girls to read with some really great accompanying pictures.  I highly recommend.

The second was not so great for us.  We are used to books which refer to the world as being millions of years old, and I address this once the children are teens, but this book called Noah’s Ark a myth, which is simply confusing for the children.  However, apart from that it was an easy to read and interesting book.

‘Stig of the Dump’ was recommended by my school teacher best friend. Whilst not strictly about the ice age per se, it was a great fiction book non the less.

Written Work for the Ice Age Unit Study

During this ice age unit study, the girls and I did some key word outlines again.  They are still fairly new to this, so we do it all together and they use the resulting paragraph as copywork:

Ice Age Unit Study: Animals

I had made some note pages (available free at the bottom of this post), and the girls researched each animal and wrote down their findings….

• The Woolly Mammoth:

• The Giant Sloth:

• The Giant Armadillos:

• The Smilodon (Sabre Toothed Tiger):

Multimedia Resources for Learning about the Ice Age

Answers in Genesis has a wonderful kids section which I am making good use of.  I created some notepages using their information and the poster they provide as a download:

We also watched the Ice Age movie, picking out characters of real Ice Age and making a few notes about them, focusing particularly on their eating habits:

From these notes, we created an Ice Age food chain:

Mapping the Ice Age

Our mapping skills were confined to simply shading the vague area on a map of the world where the ice would have spread at the height of the Ice Age:

Ice Age Unit Study: Hands On Activities

Exploring a writing-less life of the Ice Age

This was so much fun!  It was a precursor to learning about the cave painting of the Ice Age.  The idea was that one child became a caveman.  To show this they donned a wool dress. 

The caveman was given a sentence of something they might have wished to say.  I asked them first to act and grunt, without language, whilst the others tried to guess what they were trying to say. 

Next, the caveman had the opportunity to draw the sentence on the board without writing.  It demonstrated how important communicating through drawing was when one didn’t have a written language.

Caveman Lillie

Lillie was the caveman first.  She needed to communicate to the rest of the tribe that she’d had a successful hunt today and killed a deer.  This shows her grunting and gesticulating:

then trying to draw it on the white board:

Caveman Charlotte

Charlotte was next.  As expected, she was hilarious!  She had to let her tribe know about the fish which were in the river over the big hill.  Here she is grunting and gesticulating:

And drawing.  Oh. my. goodness.  The fish she drew first of all were standing up.  Then for some bissarre reason she kept drawing under the hill, expecting her tribe to call out over the hill….Hmmm:

Caveman Abigail

Abigail had to let her tribe know she had found a new cave to shelter and keep dry in.  She actually did rather well, until she started using the charades way of doing it (y’know…five words…first word…T and so on and so forth!):

She had done so well with her charades grunting and gesticulating that it took her tribe seconds to figure out the whole sentence:

Caveman Becca

Becca was by far the best and most imaginative.  She took grunting to a whole new level, with so many different types of grunts and enunciation of grunts.  It was her responsibility to ask her tribe whether anyone had seen her cutting stone:

She managed to get across that she had lost her flint stone.  In the end she got herself a stone outside and chipped away at the drawing on the white board:

So much fun!

Ice Age Unit Study: Cave Painting

The natural lead on activity from this was some cave painting.  We tried to keep it as authentic as possible, but without a cave it was a bit tricky 😉  So I borrowed some chalk pastels from Lillie (sorry Lil’!):

First of all, the girls pummelled the chalk pastels down to a powder:

Next, they added some oil:

and mixed into a paint:

They repeated that until they had all the colours they needed.  Because we were borrowing Lillie’s pastels, I limited the colours to four:

I tore some brown wrapping paper up to imitate the surface of a cave (very badly!) and printed out some examples of cave art.  The girls started to create their very own Ice Age cave art with their home made paint and using their fingers or some twigs from the garden:

I had already made a couple of cave art note pages.  We read the first, and stuck in the girls art in the second:

Ice Age Unit Study: Clothing

Fortunately, the ice age clothing was very similar to the cave men’s clothing we made during the lesson about Tubal-Cain and Jubal except there was a lot more of it!  I created a small note page for the girls to jot some notes about Ice Age clothing.  You can download these for free using the link below:

Ice Age Clothes

So basically, I used some sheep skin blanket to create some additions to our now very cold cave men.  I helped the girls make some shoes, leg warmers, a hat and a cloak for both the male and female dolls:

I took a photo and the girls added it to their note page:

Free Ice Age Note Pages!

If you like the look of all the fun note pages I’ve been busy making, please do download them for free below:

 The Ice Age