Hawaii unit study

So, as I was making this Hawaii unit study I discovered I’m terrible at spelling Hawaiian.  I can spell the base state name, but Hawaiian, I kept forgetting the third a.  Oh the travails of a homeschool Mom.  In other news, my kids loved this homeschool geography unit because of the recipe we tried.  We’ve made it several times since the first time we made it.

Books for our Hawaii unit study

Right about the time I was looking up books for our Hawaii unit study our library was changing their online catalog, so I got to learn how to use the silly thing.  I’m not entirely convinced I like the new system, but that might just be me.

• Aloha Salty– Princess loved this one because it was about a dog that saved people, but it’s a great book about both the joys and dangers of sailing and surfing around Hawaii.
• Attack on Pearl Harbor– Batman is nuts for military history, so I was two for two, and this had a lot of information.
• Dog of the Sea Waves– A fun fictionalized account of how Hawaii was discovered years ago by the Hawaiian natives.  On one possible way, either way my kids quite enjoyed the story of five brothers.
• Dumpling Soup– I love books like this that are just a “day in the life” for studying geography
• Georgia in Hawaii– Sadly I never came up with a great activity to do with this, but it would have made a great artist study
• Hawaii’s Road to Statehood– Sadly when I went by the library this one was checked out, I bet it would have been an interesting read.
• Luka’s Quilt– I loved this look into Hawaiian handicrafts
• Magnificent Voyage– I love stories of explorers, so I had great fun checking this out.
• The Last Princess– Sadly this book too was checked out, because I find the idea of Hawaiian royalty fascinating.

Hawaii Unit recipe: Hawaiian meatballs

My patent pending* Hawaiian meatball recipe.

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HAWAIIAN MEATBALLS INGREDIENTS

1 lb ground beef, 1 lb ground turkey, 1 Cup breadcrumbs, 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, 1 teaspoon garlic powder, 1 teaspoon onion powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/4 cup milk

MAKE THE SUPER AWESOME AND YUMMY HAWAIIAN MEATBALLS

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Are you prepared?  This is super duper hard, you may not be able to handle this.  Measure out all of the ingredients and put them in a bowl.

Now mush all of the ingredients together.  I usually start out using a pastry cutter, but then get annoyed with how ineffective it is, and start smushing it with my hands.

And yes, smushing is a technical description.  Sometimes the kids even get in on the smushing.

Now scoop out small amounts of roughly golf ball-sized balls, and put them on your cookie tray.  I have a rather funny story of making meatballs for Jeff as a birthday surprise because he loves meatballs, but it is a rather long story.**

Bake 20 minutes

WHILE THE HAWAIIAN MEATBALLS ARE BAKING, MAKE THE SAUCE THAT MAKES THEM HAWAIIAN

SAUCE INGREDIENTS:

1/2 cup soy sauce, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup water, 1 Cup crushed pineapple, 2 tablespoons vinegar (I think I used rice wine vinegar), 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon cold water + 2 tablespoons corn starch

NOW MIX THAT STUFF IN STEPS

1. Add all of the ingredients except the cold water and cornstarch mixture to a saucepan and bring it to a boil
2. Once it’s boiling well add the water/corn starch mixture in as you whisk the stuff, and let it reduce down to thicken.

We’ve been serving it over rice noodles, and every package I’ve gotten has had different instructions on how to cook them, but it’s always been super easy.

This makes a fair number of meatballs, and I almost always have some left afterwards, so I put them in our mini muffin pans* to freeze, and once they’re frozen I put them in a mason jar*, and that lets me defrost a few at a time for spaghetti sauce or what have you.

*okay, I don’t really have a patent pending, what I do have is a copy of this in my recipe book

** so the story.  Way back when I was a newlywed I decided to totally make my brand new husband’s day and make him meatballs for dinner with spaghetti.  So I started making them, and I found the process of rolling the meatballs tedious, so they started getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until finally the meatballs were the size of baseballs.  Then I put all of this mess into the oven to cook.  The little meatballs burned, the baseball-sized meatballs burned on the outside and were raw on the inside, and that was the last time I made meatballs for a decade.

Hawaii Unit Study: lapbook and notebooking pages

We did this Hawaii unit study when I was in one of those “I don’t know quite what to do” moods.  So, this was a fairly tame unit study for us.

Hawaii notebooking pages (on the subscriber page, join my newsletter).

In this picture, you can see the Dangers of Hawaii, Pearl Harbor, animals of Hawaii, Hawaiian folktales, and Hawaiian handicrafts mini-book (which was glued in wrong).  You can also see our volcano mini-book.

Since we did a big volcano unit last year we opted not to repeat it this year, or I should say I opted because the kids wanted to do it again.

You can get a variation on the state notebooking pages when you sign up for my newsletter over on the sidebar.

This is what the Hawaiian handicrafts book looks like when opened, we made a quilt and a lei.  I had many discussions with my kids on what is okay for these projects, I did not necessarily win.