As part of the Activities Guide I created for the book Big Red by Jim Kjelgaard, I included a unit study on groundhogs/woodchucks, because Red was constantly after woodchucks (p82).
We read Chapter 7 (Johnny Chuck Joins the Class) from The Burgess Animal Book for Children, (You can also read Chapter 8 – Whistler and Yap Yap, but reading them together might get to be too much), and after the story, I let Buck narrate back some facts he learned from the reading.
I printed pages 229-232 from the Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock, and let my 11-year old highlight key information on the pages. I let him use different colours in order to colour-code different sections (for example, everything about the home of the woodchuck he chose to highlight in green).
Then I printed out some relevant lapbook minitbooks from Homeschoolshare and let Buck complete them by using the highlighted information. It worked like a charm! He could easily access the information, filter through it and compile his answers.
I let him paste those pages he highlighted as part of the unit study, so he can always refer to it.
You can download the resources I used for free from here:
The Burgess Animal Book for Children
Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock
Minitbooks from Homeschoolshare:map
classification
hotdog (instructions on how to fold a hotdog minitbook, for use with predators)
predators
avoiding_predators
anatomy_tab
babies
diet
**You could also add a nature walk to this study, and be on the lookout for any mammals, or mammals that are related to the woodchuck/groundhog (see the Outdoor Hour Challenges) .
