Hobbit Homeschool

We've just begun The Hobbit, and I'm trying to employ some of the kinds of living book activities that we've enjoyed in the past: recipes, crafts, research, and field trips, etc. We started creating our own Hobbit books to fill in as we read; and we enjoyed a Hobbit-style afternoon tea.

Hobbit Tea:  Our little tea party was full of seed cakes, pork pies, and ale - served on bright colored dishes and a green tablecloth. We found hobbit-inspired recipes that we followed loosely:

• this recipe for our pork pies, but really we just stuffed them with some leftover pork roast. 
• this seed cake, baked in small bowls to make multiple little cakes, although we actually left out the seeds.
• Henry Weinhard Root beer made a nice ale for some of us (and the rest had cocoa)
• And we enjoyed decorating our pies with some of the tips we found in this cool video.

An unexpected tea

Seed cakes, pork pies, and blackberry tarts

Root beer for our ale

Hobbit Book: We like the Waldorf practice of making books to illustrate what you have learned, and kept using the idea even after we moved away from Waldorf curricula. For our Hobbit books, we stapled together 12 pages of construction paper, leaving us 1-2 pages per chapter (and we decided we can unstaple and add more if needed).

Each child spent plenty of time making their books cozy-looking and just the way they wanted. They decided not to glue their Bilbo's behind the door, as we originally planned, but keep him loose so that he can walk throughout the book. We'll try to illustrate characters, copy quotes, and answer discussion questions in the book as we go. For this first chapter, we focused on the characters.

We found this cool interactive map of Bilbo's journey, printed it and glued it on the back cover for reference.

the beginnings of a Hobbit book: Bilbo and his Hobbit house

Gandalf and the bearded dwarves

Gandalf and the bearded dwarves

Who knows if I'll get around to sharing the rest of our Hobbit adventures, but I'm keeping my Ideas for Living Book Activities in mind: we'll try some dragon crafts, and I'm eye-ing Hobbit legos for Christmas. We have a hike planned later this month, and I think that will be a nice venue for field-trip reading. I'm also reading the Cliff's notes, so we don't miss out on important themes, and we'll watch the movies when we're all done. Anyway, we're off to a promising start!


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