If I’m honest one of the reasons we were drawn to home education was simply because it wouldn’t impede our love of travel. This month, while our community collectively geared up for back to school, we loaded up our camper and headed to Rocky Mountains National Park. It was such a special trip full of all the things that we love: board games, s’more’s, hot chocolate, watching stars, camp fires, long walks, collecting nature treasures, and learning about our surroundings.
To help foster our six year old daughter’s love of nature and passion for learning all she can about wild spaces we brought along The Peaceful Press Mountain Guide. Their nature guides have been a wonderful way to explore interest led learning and are filled with beautiful picture books, wonderful recipes, sweet little crafts, poems, and very basic lessons in math and reading which are easy to build upon. Each of them is a four week study and happily for us the first week of this one centered around The Rocky Mountains. One of the\is week’s suggested art activities was to look at images of the Rocky Mountains and paint a picture; the watercolor our daughter created of her favorite view from our campsite is a momento I will treasure always
While the Mountain Guide comes with its own list of absolutely perfect picture books I added in a few chapter books of our own to read before bed and throughout the day. As we bounced around park service roads that week and as I tucked our sweet girl into bed each night I read aloud from a vintage children’s book ” Augustus and the Mountains.” It’s a sweet little book and full of charm and Appalachian twang. I loved finding little things I’d heard my grandmother say in its pages such as “I swain” and “lands a goshen” among many others. My daughter, though, was completely mesmerized by molasses! When I read to her about how Augustus’ brother Juppiter “liked almost anything that could be eaten, but his favorite eating was a cold biscuit into which he had stuck his finger to make a hole which was then filled with molasses” and she asked what molasses was I immediately realized two things: I’d really let her down as a mother and we needed a breakfast of molasses and biscuits.
So that’s exactly what we did! I’m still a little intimidated by our camper’s oven so I fried up some biscuits in my cast iron skillet and we ate them dripping with molasses. Our fingers were sticky and our hearts were full. While this wasn’t the recipe included in the guide it was the perfect recipe for us (the included recipe is for cornbread which I make so often it’s long ago lost its novelty). Our trip was made so much richer through using this little guide we decided to continue with each of the remaining weeks once we were home.
Week two had us exploring The Alps. We read the book “A Day on the Mountain” so many times I almost had it memorized. I added in a chapter book this week also and chose Heidi. Heidi is a beloved classic for a reason; our daughter begged to read more every single night at bedtime and was completely caught up in Heidi’s adventures. We made the recipe for Swiss Zopf bread and tried some of Heidi’s favorites as well like goat cheese and goat milk all of which were perfect for our family movie night watching, you guessed it: Heidi!
The following week we learned all about The Andes. I didn’t expect my early reader to still enjoy an alphabet book but “A Is For Alpacas” proved me wrong because it was enchanting in all the best ways. We made yarn wrapped alpacas of our own and imagined what it would be like to live in the little villages we read about in “Waiting for the Biblioburro.” I love that Peaceful Press is always so intentional with regard to inclusivity and diversity in their book lists and this one was really special. I added in a chapter book of our own, the Newberry winner “Secret of the Andes.” When we finished our novel we made the included recipe for Pan Chuta, a recipe so culturally authentic that when I tried to consult google for troubleshooting I found little help but scores of photos featuring Peruivian markets. We ground the anise seeds for this recipe in a mortar and pestle and could hardly wait to see what our bread would taste like as its aroma filled the kitchen. It was delightful; we enjoyed it with hot tea and another reading of “A is For Alpacas.”
The last week of our study took us to the Himalayan Mountains. The book “Namaste” helped us to learn more about Tibetan Buddhism while the book “Chandra’s Magic Light” inspired us in many ways. After we read this book we used old milk carton of creamer to make our very own tuki lamp similar to those in the story. These were perfect table decor when we baked this week’s bread recipe which was gurung bread – it was delicious! We dipped it in honey, sprinkled it with Himalayan salt and sipped steaming cups of black tea.
This special unit study took us all over the globe. We explored four unique mountain ranges and were welcomed into the homes and hearts of many cultures through beautiful living books. We didn’t want our time in the mountains to end and are looking forward to our next Peaceful Press Nature Study.
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