As the autumn air crisps and we head into the colder months, there is nothing quite like gathering the kids around a cozy fire for storytime. But what if your read-aloud time could double as your entire homeschool curriculum? This week, our family dove deep into the breathtaking, frosty world of the Dakota Territory with The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder**. Reading about how the Ingalls family survived the historic blizzards of 1880 sparked so many questions about history, survival, and science that I knew I had to build something bigger. If you are looking to trade dry textbooks for a rich, immersive living book experience, here is how you can transform this classic frontier tale into a rigorous, hands-on 6-week unit study for your middle schooler.
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🔑 The Long Winter: Teacher Answer Key
Mornings:
We start every morning off with our prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance. Below is a video of how we start our mornings.
Don’t have a flag? Grab one HEREand print it out to put up somewhere… you could even let the kids make a flag to proudly display. Amazon also has some little ones like this one HERE and HERE.
Tip: If you want to go to a certain week/chapter or topic simply push the ‘ctrl’ and the ‘F’ button down together and a small bar will pop up. Type in the week number or chapter number you want and it will take you to it.
Week 3: Isolation Sets In (Chapters 12–17)
- Reading Schedule:
- Day 1: Ch. 12 (The Hard Winter)
- Day 2: Ch. 13 (We’ll Weather the Blast)
- Day 3: Ch. 14 (One Bright Day)
- Day 4: Ch. 15 (No Trains)
- Day 5: Ch. 16 (The Forty Days) & Ch. 17 (The Solitary Grinding)
Language Arts
- Vocabulary:
- Monotonous
- solitary
- subduing
- melancholy
- meager
- endurance.
- Discussion Question:
- How does the atmosphere in the house change when the family realizes the trains have completely stopped running until spring?
- Writing Activity: Write a poem about the sound of the wind or the rhythmic scratching of the homemade coffee mill grinding wheat grain.
Optional Activities:
Math Word Problem
Problem: Ma uses a small hand-crank coffee mill to grind wheat grain into flour. It takes Laura and Carrie 45 minutes of continuous grinding to produce 1.5 pounds of coarse flour.
- Find the unit rate of flour production in pounds per hour.
- If the family requires a minimum of 14 pounds of flour for their weekly bread allowance, set up a proportion to find out how many total hours they will spend grinding wheat each week. Round your final answer to the nearest tenth of an hour.
Optional Activities:
- Beginning Fractions & Decimals by Rock ‘N Learn
- Bubble Pop! Math Challenge Games – Gr. 3‑4
- CoolMath4Kids
- PBS Kids Games
Geography & History
- Topic: Food preservation in the 1800s. Explore how people survived without refrigeration, canned convenience items, or global supply chains during extended winters.
Optional Activities:
Science
- Topic: Friction and simple machinery. Study how mechanical grinding wheels work. Set up a simple exploration using a handheld mortar and pestle or hand-crank mill to test mechanical advantages.
Optional Activities:
- Mystery Science
- All About Life Science Activities
- National Geographic Match the Fact Cards
- National Geographic Kids What Animal Am I Card Game
Life Skills
- Topic: Hand-grinding grain. Try utilizing a heavy-duty home blender or clean hand mill to grind whole wheat berries into coarse flour. Bake a simple loaf of rustic soda bread with the results.
- The “Solitary Grinding” Kitchen Chemistry Lab
- Background: In Chapter 17, the trains have stopped completely, and the family faces starvation. To survive, Laura and Carrie spend hours manually grinding seed wheat in a small, hand-crank coffee mill to make a coarse flour for Ma’s daily bread. In this lab, you will experience this labor and examine the kitchen chemistry of pioneer baking.
- Materials Needed: Whole wheat berries/grain kernels, a high-powered blender or a clean hand mill, baking soda, water, salt.
- Procedure:
- Place 1 cup of whole wheat berries into your grinding tool. Grind it until it reaches a powdery, coarse meal texture. Do not sift out the heavy brown flakes (bran).
- Mix your coarse flour with 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, a pinch of salt, and warm water until a dense dough forms. Bake it in an oven at 375°F until firm.
- Lab Analysis Questions:
- Describe the texture, color, and density of your homemade flour compared to the pre-sifted white flour you buy at a modern grocery store.
- Kitchen Chemistry: Ma had no yeast, eggs, milk, or sugar left in her pantry. Our recipe uses baking soda. In chemistry, baking soda is a base. To make bread rise, a base must react with an acid to produce carbon dioxide gas bubbles. Because Ma lacked acidic ingredients (like sour milk or cream of tartar), her bread remained incredibly flat, dense, and heavy. How would eating this heavy, un-sifted “brown bread” every day affect a family’s energy levels and mood over five long months?
Optional Activities:
- Plain and Not So Plain Home Economics Course (she has other subjects as well)
PE, Health & Safety
- Topic: Muscle fatigue and indoor conditioning. Pa and the girls experience heavy physical exhaustion from grinding wheat for hours. Map out an indoor physical stretching routine to combat muscle soreness and maintain joint health while stuck inside.
Art, Music & Crafts
- Topic: Pioneer music. Listen to or sing traditional folk tunes played by Pa on his fiddle, such as “We’ll Weather the Blast” or “In the Starlight.” Draw a visual design inspired by the lyrics.
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