2 Week Thematic Unit: It's a Small World - Fun for the Whole Family!

Welcome to my first posted thematic unit and one of my all-time favorites, It’s a Small World!

You may be asking:

What is a thematic unit?
Why do you call it that instead of a unit study?

Well, a thematic unit is just a way of teaching by using a specific theme or topic!

I call this a thematic unit instead of a unit study because, to me, unit studies are heavy on academics and reach across all or most content areas. For example, we use Gather Round Homeschool unit studies as our main homeschool curriculum.

Now to answer the second question, let me give a little backstory. 🙂

For the past, almost 4 years, I’ve created and used thematic units with my kids through the summer as a fun way to keep their brains working and to provide some structure to our day. We always refer to them as our “themed weeks” because most of them only last one week (this one is the only two week I’ve done!).

My girls have learned a lot through these units but they aren’t heavy on worksheets and academics like that. They are lighter, more hands-on, and designed for fun learning! We do use them through summer break after all!

So in my brain it looks like this:

Unit Study – topical learning that’s heavy on academic content with multiple subjects
Thematic Unit – topical learning that’s lighter on academic content without activities always being focused on subjects

Now that I’ve cleared that up :), let’s get on with how it works!

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post may be affiliate links. If you purchase through my link, you won’t pay a penny more, however I will receive a small percentage back. Thank you for helping support my blog in this way! With that said, I only recommend products that I personally love!

How to Use this Thematic Unit

This unit is designed to cover one country each day, M-F, for two weeks. This means there are 10 countries covered! I will be listing each country and the activities we did throughout that day.

I would say this is mostly for kids in early elementary and below. You could modify it by adding in material for older kids to do with your younger kids, though.

The beauty of units such as these, is that you have complete freedom to do it in any way that works for you. You can do the countries in any order you want. You can do it exactly as we did, or pick and choose what your kids would like. You can do one country a day or stretch it out if your kids take special interest in any of them. Make it work for you!

Before beginning the unit, I printed and assembled a “Countries Around the World” booklet for them to complete as we went through each country. It didn’t take a ton of time and the girls really enjoyed finding the country in it to color each day!

18 countries?! But you said there were only 10 covered!! Yes, this book covers 18 countries, and Canada and Ireland actually aren’t even in it. (I added inserts for those two.)

I stapled all the countries into a book in the order I thought we would go through them, including the extras. I plan on doing an It’s a Small World Unit 2 another summer and we will just pull this booklet back out and finish it. 🙂 Again, though, feel free to assemble your book however you like!

I had also planned on printing out a pretend passport for them to use, but unfortunately, that’s something I just didn’t get to. You can find both of these resources, including the links to the Canada and Ireland inserts, in my It’s a Small World Pinterest Board linked at the end of this post!

There are LOTS of amazing books you could use during this unit, but the two I went to every day were:

1.) The Travel Book, by Lonely Planet Kids (Has a page for every country in the world!)

2.) If You Lived Here: Houses of the World, by Giles Laroche (only read on days where that country was represented in the book)

3.) Pancakes to Parathas, by Alice B. McGinty (I didn’t have this one at the time, but I’ve since purchased it and it would be a great addition!)

A Look at Our Daily Routine During This Unit

Wake-up, Breakfast, Get Dressed
Gather together to be introduced to the country of the day and read a page in The Travel Book and If You Lived Here.
Watch Videos
Find the day’s country in the Countries Around the World book and colored it.
Practice saying Hello, Goodbye, Yes, No, Please, Thank you, and Excuse Me in the language of the day while having a snack.
Activity of the Day
Free-Play/Outside
Lunch
Rotating Activity Stations (I have 3 for three kids)
Free Play/Outside Until Dinner

That’s it! I think that’s all you need to know to get started! In the rest of this post, I’ll share with you the resources I used for each country. Hopefully this will help you save tons of time in getting started and organized!

Now without further ado……

Country #1

Videos:

The Jeography Songs we LOVE! (And yes, it’s spelled that way!) We were always disappointed when there wasn’t one for our country of the day! Nat Geo Kids: Are We There Yet is another of our favorites. You’ll find them all throughout this unit. 🙂

Activity of the Day

Today we made homemade focaccia together. It was fun and sooooo delicious to eat with our tagliatelle bolognese at dinner.

Rotating Activity Stations

Learning/Activity Stations are something I use with my girls a lot. I use it in our homeschool and I often utilize them in the thematic units we do during the summer. I love that it gives each of them time to work on an activity individually. I can walk around and help them as they need it, or create two independent stations and one that I’m going to be working with them at. I usually make each rotation 15-30 minutes long, depending on the activities of the day.

If this isn’t for you, that’s fine! You could make any of these things whole group or just skip them altogether.

The learning stations today were:

Coloring Pages
Pizza Dramatic Play
- We have a play kitchen with a wooden pizza and toppings so we set up a little “pizza shop”. I printed out pizza order forms to use and I was their customer. We even got out some play money to practice money counting. They really enjoyed making their momma some pizza. 🙂 If you don’t have this, though, you could always do a “make a pizza craft”.
Learning Apps on the iPad

Pinterest Board

Here’s where you can find the links to resources that I’ve mentioned using for our Italy day, including the language print out and the recipes we used for dinner!

Amazon Music Playlist

We used these playlists mostly for background music during dinner, but they could also be used as background music during activity stations, too!

https://music.amazon.com/user-playlists/7641df2934de4c2cbbb83dc799831d67sune?marketplaceId=ATVPDKIKX0DER&musicTerritory=US

Book List

We did not personally use all of these books during this unit, but I wanted to provide a list of books that I thought would be a great addition! This is true for the book list in every country.

Living in Italy, by Chloe Perkins
Ancient Wonders – Then and Now, by Lonely Planet Kids (Colosseum, Roman Baths)
Italy: Travel for Kids, by Dinobibi Publishing and Celia Jenkins
Italy ABCs, by Sharon Katz Cooper
Where is the Colosseum, by Jim O’Connor
First Words – Italian, by Lonely Planet Kids
Magic Tree House: Monday with a Mad Genius, by Mary Pope Osborne (Leonardo Di Vinci)
Magic Tree House: Vacation Under the Volcano, by Mary Pope Osborne

Movies

Lady and the Tramp
The Lizzie McGuire Movie

Country #2