Ireland Unit

Hi! This is Future Ticia 2023 updating this post, wow 10 years later. We’ve since studied Ireland again, and honestly I’m a bit more organized in my geography lessons, so I’ll be updating this old post with the new materials, into one uber Ireland Unit! There is a bit of a history lesson and more specifically church history lessons (apparently I need to create a church history landing page).

(there are affiliate links in here)

Last year, I have to admit I didn’t do as good of a job as I wanted to with our cooking around the world, and I completely missed Austria……..  That recipe turned out not quite right, and would make for a great comic post………..  This year, I’m excited to announce all of the countries ahead of time, so you can join in more easily! We’re starting off with some time in Europe and heading over to France next.

Ireland Unit recipe: Irish beef stew and beer bread.

based loosely on Irish Beef Pub Stew

Irish Beef Stew ingredients:

2-4 pounds of beef stew meat, 1 can of tomato soup, 1 can of water, 1/4 cup of apple juice, 4 carrots cut up, 6 potatoes cut up, onion powder (forgot to buy onions), pepper and salt to taste, garlic

Let’s make some Irish beef stew

1.  Heat a frying pan to high, then brown the meat for just a few minutes to seal in the juices.
2. In the meantime send your kids over to peel carrots and potatoes (you can just clean the potatoes, but my family prefers no skin).
3. Chop up the carrots into pieces about an inch or so long.  Then chop up the potatoes into bite-size pieces as well.  Dump all of this into your slow cooker.
4. Add everything into your slow cooker and stir it to mix it all up.  Now turn your slow cooker on low if you remembered to do this in the morning.  Or if you’re like me, and remembered to do it about 2:00 in the afternoon, turn it on high and hope it cooks really fast.

Irish Beer Bread

The kids ate it so fast, I do not have a picture of it. Future Ticia 2023 says I need to remake this so I have a picture, mentally rearranges meal plans for the week.

Irish beer bread ingredients:

2.5 cups of self-rising flour, 1 warm beer, 2 tablespoons sugar

Making Irish Beer bread

1. Amuse the heck out of your husband because his teetotaler wife has asked him to get a bottle of “good beer.”
2. Measure out the flour and sugar, and pour in the beer.
3. Lightly mix it together, then put it in a greased loaf pan to cook.
4. Cook at 375 for 45 minutes.  While it’s cooking pat yourself on the back for making homemade bread.
5. Eat 2 of the mini-loaves yourself and don’t share them with anyone.  Oh wait, maybe that’s just what I did…………  Either way, we devoured most of it that night.

Elementary Ireland Unit

Hi, Future Ticia 2023, this is what we did way back when my kids were in elementary school. At the time I was creating country summaries for the kids to read and get their facts from (maybe at some point I’ll go back and do that for all of the countries we’ve studied). You can find that in the subscriber portion of the website (JOIN MY NEWSLETTER).

Sigh, I miss Microsoft graphics, where I could search for images I could use without worrying about copyright. Also, it had some of the weirdest images in it.

We made paper dolls of the people with Making Friends Paper dolls.

Then we created a lapbook……….

Paragraph of resources that no longer exist. I also printed out the foods from Ireland from Homeschool Share’s Ireland lapbook. Sigh, 10 years later, of the original things I linked to, only Homeschool Share is still up.

We made Saint Patrick’s bell.  I loved that I could find a picture of the Saint Patrick’s bell in its case to show my kids.  We also read St. Patrick and the Three Brave Mice, which the kids have made us reread about 10 times since we first read it.  They’ve also been carrying it around rather obsessively. Super easy craft, directions are in Ireland printable I created (remember that newsletter I mentioned?).

As they were busy painting, I started making a Saint Patrick peg doll, inspired by this little guy.

I can’t quite decide if I want to draw a face on him or not.  I still want to add some gold trim, but my gold paint pen had dried up…….  Poor Ticia

Then we designed leprechaun traps from the printable I made.  I loved the creativity my kids had.

Finally, we listened to the Adventures in Odyssey episode about Saint Patrick and read about his explanation of the Trinity using the Shamrock (also in the Ireland printable).

Future Ticia 2023 is adding, now watching Lutheran Satire video is a must.

All in all, quite a successful study.

Ireland Unit booklist

I used these books both in our elementary study and our middle school. So here are all of the books I used (this is part of the Ireland printable on the subscriber page).

• Balwhinney Girl– since bog people has come up in the news again somewhat recently, this seems rather amusingly still timely 10 years after it was first published
• Brave Margaret– I love San Souci’s books, they always do such a great job of taking classic tales and keeping them true to the story, but interesting for current audiences
• Feed the Children First– I did not use this, but if you want a more detailed Ireland unit with your upper elementary or middle school students, I would highly encourage this important bit of history
• Finn MacCoul and his fearless wife– stories like this greatly amuse me
• Finn McCool and the great fish– I’m greatly amused his name is spelled differently from book to book, now I see why, Eve Bunting adapted this one, she’s a master storyteller
• Fiona’s Lace-I clearly need to add this to my Immigration list…
• Fiona’s Luck– and this is a folk tale with the same character name
• The ink garden of Brother Theophane– this was such a fun book and we had fun trying to make ink with berries
• Jamie O’Rourke and the pooka– Tomie DePaola is a genius at creating likable folk tale characters (see his Strega Nona books from Italy)
• Katie’s Wish– a good book for younger kids on the Irish Potato Famine
• The King of Ireland’s Son– more fun fairy tales, fitting for Ireland to have so many
• King Puck– since Midsummer is my favorite Shakespeare, this is only fitting
• The Last Snake in Ireland: a story about St. Patrick– I don’t remember this book much, but the story sound hilarious
• The Legend of the Loch Ness Monster– I want to check out the other books in this series
• The Loch Mess Monster– I always find books with fictional monsters as the character investigating “real” monsters hilarious, also I appreciate the pun
• The luck of the Loch Ness monster: a tale of picky eating– this out of print tall tale is amusing
• O’Sullivan stew: a tale cooked up in Ireland– another out of print book that is a fun story
• Sally go round the stars: favourite rhymes for an Irish childhood– notice the British spelling of favorite, also I love nursery rhymes
• Small beauties: the journey of Darcy Heart O’Hara– I love books that focus on small moments like this
• St. Patrick and the three brave mice– this book inspired the craft up above
• The St. Patrick’s Day Shillelagh– another potato famine book
• the Story of the Jack O’Lantern– we don’t tend to think of Halloween books and Ireland, which is strange because there are several traditions from there
• Too many leprechauns, or, How that pot o’ gold got to the end of the rainbow– this is out of print, but adorable, but you could easily substitute any other leprechaun book for your Ireland study, since that is a particularly well-known aspect of Irish culture

High School Ireland Unit, or maybe middle school

For high middle school, we used our Europe notebooking pages and some mini-books based on the books I got from the library. Somehow I don’t have pictures of the mini-books though, so I’ll just describe what I added in.

So not-pictured mini-books:

• How to trap the loch ness monster
• My Illuminated text
• Irish folktales

and my amusing fun facts from this unit:

• they can’t agree on the number of counties
• they have strong ties to France and Spain, which is amusing to me given England’s traditional dislike of France, though there’s that story where Ireland and Scotland (I think) were playing each other in soccer, and Ireland’s cheer was “We hate England more than you,” which greatly amuses me
• the sport of hurling amuses me, I very much enjoy learning about unique sports from different countries

Later after we did this study, we briefly talked about the British/Irish stuff going on for most of the 20th century, and the information I had about it from growing up during the last half, and how STNG did a not-so-thinly-veiled show about the “Irish terrorists/freedom fighters.”

More learning you can do

Since this post has become a mash-up of many different things, the suggested posts I give you will also be a mashup of many different things.

• Graphing Green Eggs and Ham
• War of the Roses lesson
• 7th-grade books made into movies
• Me on the Map: My Room
• Ecuador Unit

Follow Ticia Adventures in Mommydom’s board Saint Patrick’s Day for kids on Pinterest.

I’ve got a few ideas for Saint Patrick’s Day on my pinterest board,

“Ireland-KylemoreCoGalway-Abbey” by nznomad is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.