Automobile Unit Study

(click to enlarge)

This Automobile Unit is one I promised Abe ages ago. I'm not sure how he got so interested in cars, since I have hardly ever given a second thought to them, but somehow he did. And lots of this unit covered things he already knew! But it was fun for the rest of us to catch up with him a little. :) For Sebastian's part, he loves road signs and markings, so we made sure to loop those into our unit as well.

We spent quite a long time covering all these things, and many of the days didn't really have something to take a picture of, but there are a few other posts under the "Automobile Unit" tag.

Some miscellaneous links:

The difference between "brake horsepower" and "wheel horsepower"

"Bloodhound SSC" is the car that's trying to break Thrust SSC's speed record

This place sounds really cool. The boys say they would love to go there someday!

Car Talk! I used to love listening to this show in the car on Saturday mornings when my mom and I were out doing errands.

Ideas from a unit study on the Model T Ford.

Model T coloring page.

And here's my Pinterest page for the Automobile Unit, with many of these same links.

We watched some carefully-selected episodes of "Top Gear" with the children, but man it was hard to find ones without swearing or crudeness! Too bad, because they loved that show. We also watched Disney's "Cars 2" and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" during this unit.

Speaking of "Top Gear," though, by FAR our favorite book of the unit was by Richard Hammond from "Top Gear." It's called Car Science and it was just excellent. It explained every aspect of how cars work, in an engaging way, without talking down to the reader, but in simple enough terms that I understood concepts I was totally baffled by in other books. I highly recommend it!