Homeschool Photobomb: Dallin's Norse Myths Lesson Book

 In November we began Dallin's Norse Myths main lesson block.  We took a break during December and then finished it up in January.  This was hands-down his favorite thing we have ever done in homeschool.  EVER.   He ADORED the stories, and I'm pretty sure he secretly wants to be Thor.  This block was heavy on writing, drawing, and painting (all of his least favorite things).  I kept him busy, and he filled a main lesson book with a great record of everything he learned.  He did not especially enjoy writing, drawing, and painting about the myths, but at least the enjoyment of the stories themselves helped ease the pain of having to actually do work related to them.   We used as our source the book D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths by Ingri and Edgar D'Aulaire.  He would have read the entire thing in one day had I let him, but I stretched the stories out over six weeks.  It definitely builds up the suspense to do it that way.  I used the Christopherus curriculum as a base for laying out the block and also for drawing, painting, and form drawing ideas.

Title page.  We did learn to write in real runes, and he wrote his name using the runic alphabet.

Table of Contents

The D'Aulaire book is full of these creepy, funny little knotted creatures, and we drew several of them as part of form drawing.  They are challenging!

Painting of the Rainbow Bridge leading to Asgard, where the Norse gods live.

This is a painting of creation:  the ice and fog of Niflheim meet the fire and sparks from Muspelheim.

 A drawing based on one from the book:  the sun and moon are pulled on a circular path by horses, while being chased by wolves.

Writing about Yggdrasil, the World Tree

 The World Tree and the nine Norse worlds (with Gimle, high heaven, above).

In addition to the knotted forms, we also drew a lot of braids.  NOT easy... but we persevered, and he did it.

A grammar exercise turned summary.  He was given the names of several gods and goddesses, and had to provide an adjective to describe each, a verb to show what they did, and an adverb to illustrate how they did it.  The picture is of Heimdahl.

Another complicated knotted creature accompanying Dallin's summary of Loki's Monstrous Blood.

Dallin's quite-nice drawing of Odin, based on part of an illustration in the book.

More knots.

Acrostic poetry

Jotunheim, land of the ice giants and trolls

Dallin's painting of the Death of Baldur.  This is the boat carrying Baldur's body riding off toward Hel.  I think Dallin's choice of colors is interesting (and he was very adamant about how he wanted to do this drawing). 

He did a lot more writing that I haven't included in this post.

Beeswax modelling of Thor and the serpent.  Mine is on the left, and Dallin's is on the right.  Dallin delights in telling me that my Thor doesn't look as tough as his.

We also hit grammar heavy during this block.  We reviewed nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, from previous years, and added the other parts of speech.  We used the Three Norns from this mythology to teach the concepts of past, present, and future tense, and we'll be using examples from the gods to introduce the four types of sentences.