The Wild Horses of Sweetbriar

We just wrapped up a week of engaging with, and enjoying, the beautifully illustrated and written picture book The Wild Horses of Sweetbriar by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock. It was R's "preschool book" as we call it which was perfect for him because he's pretty intrigued by horses. (We do one "preschool book" every one or two weeks in addition to the separate unit studies we do for my 6-year-old, E. R loves having something that's specifically for him even though the three of us do it all together and E gets as much as if not more from these preschool books than the preschooler probably does!).

The book is set on the island of Sweetbriar in Massachusetts so after reading the book for the first time, one of our first activities was to learn a bit about the state by finding it on the globe - first we found North America, then the U.S., then Massachusetts. As we often do when learning about a state, we colored the appropriate state page in the Dover United States Coloring Book. I print out two copies of the page, one for R, one for E, and we don't actually color in the book so that we can keep re-using the pages as we study states in the future.

I also had the Massachusetts state card out from a U.S. flash cards set like this one. I printed out a small picture of the region in which the story takes place and had a couple of books on horses on hand too that we checked out from the library. It's not shown in my photo but my favorite was Horses! by Gail Gibbons because like most of Gibbons' books, it's extremely thorough, easy for kids to understand and has bright, colorful, interesting and informative pictures.

I'm such a fan of three part cards, so to learn the basic anatomy of a horse, we used these horse nomenclature cards.

We already had this horse placemat on hand which shows many breeds of horses and both R and E had fun matching the photos on the placemat with these horse magnets I'd found at the thrift store a while back.

As we often do, we put together this FREE lapbook on all we were learning. E was especially eager to put together this "Horsing Around with Homophones" book as well.

All week, we had out this folding horse stable I found at a garage sale last year along with a handful of horse figurines so that kids could simply play. And usually, we would have topped off our study with a trip to see some horses, maybe even to ride and groom and feed them. But only a couple of weeks prior, we'd already done something similar. : )

Have you read The Wild Horses of Sweetbriar?

What have you done to study horses that you can share?

Feel free to check out my Wild Horses of Sweetbriar board on Pinterest for more ideas!