 Hey everybody! Welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be a look inside of our brand new and the first of its kind a novel unit study for a Christmas carol. Now it is not Christmas here for us without Ebenezer Scrooge and his three spirits. It is a book or a story that we have been reading aloud since as long as I can remember whether that was in picture book form when Emily was younger or me reading this aloud over the past three or four years or this year reading it and deep diving with a novel unit study which I'm so excited about because it is just a time-honored tradition in our family so really being able to deep dive and make it a family learning affair is going to be so much fun. Now any book that is a Christmas carol that is the original text will work for this novel unit study. You could technically use one of the picture books for it you're not going to be able to use to do all of the comprehension because all of the comprehension questions are going to be based off of something that is the original text. Whether that is this copy which by the way is like 3.99 on amazon or whether that is one of the maybe nicer illustrated editions which this is what I'm going to read from this year because it's absolutely beautiful but as long as the actual text within it is the original text one that has the five staves it will work with this novel unit study. Okay so now let's go ahead and look inside so you can see everything that is included when you get this unit study for a Christmas carol. The first thing we have is kind of an introduction page this is a little bit of what's included how it's going to work and kind of my heart behind it and then every stave which there's five of has a very similar setup so they're all going to include copy work of some kind. They're all going to include vocabulary work of some kind and all the activities are going to vary from stave to stave but there's going to be one for every stave as well as an answer key for that so that you don't have to try to remember at all. There's going to be comprehension for every stave some of them are going to be fill in the blank some will be multiple choice some will be short answer they're going to vary from stave to stave as well but there will be comprehension for each and every one with answer keys. There's going to be a summary for each stave they're going to draw a picture of something that they think represented that stave and answer a few short questions about it to kind of summarize what they've read or what it's been read to them and then there's going to be creative writing for each stave the creative writing project or suggested project is going to be in relation to that stave in some kind so like stave one they're going to pretend to be Scrooge and write a diary entry right after they have seen or met Jacob Marley so it will be in relation to that then like i said every stave repeats in a very similar fashion the activities just change a little then once you get through all five staves we have some figurative language activities. Now christen's carol is full of rich figurative language so i really wanted the kids to be able to explore that and learn more about it and kind of why we include it in really great writing so that's what we're going to do here we're going to talk about why it's included in great writing we're going to give examples of the different types of figurative language the definitions of them and how they can be used then they're going to go search christen's carol and find a few examples for themselves the last thing they're going to do is going to be a hands-on language activity where they're going to kind of do this game type of thing with figurative language from the book so in the figurative language hands-on activity we are basically going to be analyzing sentences from the text and trying to decide whether they are a metaphor, assembly, an onomatopoeia, an illusion, a hyperbole, a pun, an idiom, or a personification what they're an example of and each of these cards has the definition on it so that the kids don't have to try to have it memorized or remember they can have it to reference so they'll pick one of 20 cards here and they will look at the underlined part and try to figure out what that is so in this instance it's a metaphor yeah metaphor and this one is a simile that's another simile that one's an onomatopoeia that one is personification idiom a pun you get the idea so they're going to just do all of them like that and there is an answer key included so you don't have to try to know yourself which each one of these is we also have a christmas carol crossword puzzle so this is going to kind of be a review of the entire book at this point there's an answer key for that as well then we have a project where they get to design their own book cover so they're going to reimagine the book cover for a christmas carol and then we have elements of a story so there's going to be multiple different things here that have to do with elements of a story so that we can really dig into what it takes to create a great story like a christmas carol so we have story setting identifying the theme plotting the story character analysis which they get to pick their favorite character for it doesn't have to specifically be any character persuasive writing book review which this is going to be so much fun they get to try to persuade a friend whether they should read or not read the book book and movie comparison which this will work with any of the christmas carol movies so you can pick the one your family loves most or you can pick whichever one you think is most appropriate depending on the age of your child and then we have cross curricular connection so this is going to be a list of a lot of different ideas of how you can use a christmas carol in your homeschool and incorporate math writing social studies science art and music so we're really going to dig into making it kind of an all-encompassing unit study