Let’s face it: Kids will always love to watch TV. There’s nothing we can do about it. But we can turn TV into a way to learn and that’s why we put together a fun The Aristocats unit study! This is a neat way to weave learning into movie watching, especially if kids are obsessed with classic Disney movies (like mine are).
Since The Aristocats takes place in France, you can talk about geography. But you can also learn about pedigree cats, art, and much more! Read on to see what kinds of activities we did to go along with this children’s movie!
If you enjoy this lesson, try some of our other unit studies, including our Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs unit study!
The Aristocats Unit Study
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Naturally, we got started by watching The Aristocats. It was our first time seeing it, so we let the kids get comfy on the sofa.
That’s the life, isn’t it?
We watched it on Netflix, but if you don’t have Netflix, you can rent it from Amazon for just $2.99.
The kids loved it, but we wanted to make watching the movie into a learning experience. So we decided to spend some time learning about pedigree cats and the city of Paris!
We created a set of notebooking pages featuring several pedigree cat breeds, including the Siamese Cat, the Persian Cat, and the Japanese Bobtail Cat. If you want to use it with your kids, feel free to download our Pedigree Cats notebooking pages by clicking the image or link below!
>>>>> Pedigree Cats Notebooking Pages <<<<<
To do our research, we made liberal use of the Internet. About a month ago, we bought an HDMI cable for our television and now we do most of our online research in the living room using the TV. It’s much better than trying to crowd everyone around the computer screen.
As we looked up the basic information about our cat breeds, Tigger wrote down the vital statistics on the notebooking pages. By the way, all of the facts in the notebooking pages can be found on Wikipedia.
It must be pretty nice to have school in your robe.
After we finished our research into the world of pedigree cats, we decided to take a virtual tour of Paris. A lot of the iconic sights of Paris appear in The Aristocats, including the Eiffel Tower, the River Seine, and the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
We watched a playlist of Paris travel videos from Rick Steves to learn more about these and other sights of Paris.
After that, it was time to make our own pretend “Plaster of Paris”! We used a great recipe for foam dough. And the kids loved playing with it!
We all loved learning with the movie “The Aristocats”! We had a great time learning about cats, the city of Paris, and how to make foam dough!
Ready to try some other homeschool unit studies?
Plus, see more fun thematic units on my Unit Studies Pinterest board!
This post is part of the Movie and a Big Idea linkup from iHomeschool Network! Click over to read more fun movie-themed homeschool lessons you can use!
Love it! What a great idea. My husband and often use movies and video as teaching moments, but creating unit lessons around it is an awesome idea. Thanks for sharing.
I love how you incorporated the foam dough into your unit. We too are using the tv to research. Have you ever heard of airparrot? It will stream your computer straight to apple tv. It is divine!
No, I haven’t heard of that, but then again, we don’t have Apple TV…lol. As soon as we hooked up the computer to the TV, I thought, “Why didn’t I do this months ago?” That was definitely a facepalm moment. 🙂
Interesting! I haven’t seen Aristocats either. I like the idea of basing lessons around movies. Great way to get kids engaged.
Oh good, I’m not the only one…lol. Thanks for stopping by! 🙂