Switzerland unit study

My awareness of Switzerland as a child pretty much consisted of Cuckoo clocks, the Shirley Temple version of Heidi, and chocolate.  Fast forward to high school and I started hearing jokes in relation to being neutral and Switzerland being brought up.  My knowledge of Switzerland eventually increased to include yodeling, fondue, and the Alps, not a particularly good geography lesson.  After studying history lessons for a few years I added in about the Reformation, and a few other odds and ends.  Needless to say, I’m excited for our Switzerland Unit to give my knowledge a bit more framework.

Future Ticia 2024 is updating this to include the recipe, so I don’t have a couple of different posts when one longer post makes sense.

{I received a free copy of Cuckoo Clock Secrets* from Case of Adventure* and was compensated for my time, all views are my own, and affiliate links within this post are marked with an *}

Our spine for the Switzerland Unit

Our spine, and really could be the whole unit study was The Cuckoo Clock Secrets, it’s an awesome chapter book about a homeschooling family solving, you guessed it, the mystery of the cuckoo clock they found in their Grandpa’s attic.  During the book, they travel all over Switzerland and learn a fair bit of history.

Each chapter ends with two research questions (that I absolutely adored and have used as the basis for my kids reading as we did our Switzerland study for the past few weeks).

Future Ticia 2024 has deleted a few pictures because I just didn’t feel like updating them… I’m lazy.

When you buy the book, there is also a Switzerland lapbook you can purchase.  If your family is into lapbooking in the least bit buy it.  If not, buy it anyway because the teacher manual has all sorts of amazing tips and suggestions.  My kids are rather…… indifferent to lapbooks, so we put together a joint lapbook, and I let them choose some pieces for their Europe notebook as a compromise.

The other cool product that works with all of their books is the Mega Travel Activity Pack*.  That has all of your spy gear because if you’re solving a mystery, you really need spy gear and codes.  My kids were completely tickled pink to get their own spy ID card.  It didn’t matter my boys are almost 12, they still thought it was fun to be fingerprinted.   It sometimes greatly amuses me what kids think is cool.  The spy codes in the pack became the inspiration for one of our writing assignments during the unit (each day I gave them a paragraph to write, it was quite interesting).

On the subject of weird things my kids found amusing, my kids found the video of the flight attendant on the Air Switzerland plane hilarious and kept asking to rewatch it.  Don’t ask me why, but they did.

Each chapter has several videos to watch related to the content, so we learned how cuckoo clocks were made, all about how ropes were made for mountain climbing, relative distances, and the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland (a huge part of the mystery).  The kids all loved the Ice Hotel video so much, they MADE me show it to Jeff.  Of course, they also tried to show Jeff the air safety video.

There is no accounting for a child’s sense of taste.

I also showed the kids several pictures from the Case of Adventure Instagram account, because there’s cool stuff there, and Karyn is doing a great job of posting super useful stuff to her books.

Our Switzerland lapbook

Continuing my dislike of refolding file folders, and also so the kids could add these pieces into their own Europe Geography notebook, we glued our lapbook pieces onto cardstock.  This is also why the lapbook pieces look so much more professional than when I design lapbooks.  My lapbook pieces are boring mini books, nowhere near as cool as cuckoo clocks or cool shapes.

Sign up on the homepage to get a free map pack* you can use for this and other country studies.

Our Switzerland unit extension activities

To go with our Switzerland unit study I went to the library and picked up some picture books.  Cuckoo Clock Secrets* had enough general history/geography/etc. I didn’t get any of the “Meet Switzerland” type books, but I found some super cute picture books that were some fun additions (and I’m lazy, these are all affiliate links pretend there’s an asterisk*)

• Heidi– this is a VERY abridged version of the novel, but it let me claim they read the book before we watched the movie (when my kids reached the chapter Heidi was mentioned they got very excited since we’d read this picture book)
• Chocolate Cow– all about a family and their dairy cows, there’s a lot of great information about their national culture in this little picture book.
• The Happy Troll– This was primarily a cute book, and because I liked it.
• Anna’s Wish– Super cute picture book about a girl’s wish for snow, my kids feel her pain
• Happy Birthday Harvey Hare-This one was checked out, but we read the Christmas story from these books, and it’s a great story about helping friends (the author is Swiss, so it’s not intrinsically Swiss in nature, just a cute story)
• Holey Moley– two mole brothers are bored and want something to do, will they learn how to play together before they get too frustrated? (this is included because the author is Swiss, he’s also the author of the Rainbow Fish books, so you could do those books)
• William Tell–  Sadly this was checked out of the library, because I really wanted to see the boys’ reaction to it

We watched Heidi as a book and a movie and cooked several of the recipes included in the lapbook (both of these will be separate posts later on).  This really dovetailed perfectly with the book because they got to see another view of Switzerland.

And of course we tried lots of different types of cheeses, we went on a field trip to a homestead village and saw their cheese making factory, but I have zero pictures.  I know, bad homeschool blogger.  Instead, I give you a picture from a similar field trip when they were 4.

All in all, I loved our Switzerland Unit, and I’m thinking we might will revisit Scotland when they come out with their Scotland book later this year.

Switzerland recipe: Swiss mac and cheese

Literally copied over from that post, which I now realize has more recipes than just Swiss mac and cheese:

I almost want to joke about creating my very own cooking show called: Cooking with Ticia ™, where you watch the mad-cap adventures of Ticia as she manages to mangle beloved cultural cuisine with her inept cooking.  Except I do occasionally do well with the recipes I share, and no one has ever gotten sick from eating my food.  And yet, here I am again about to tell you how my Switzerland meal did not go as planned.

I mean the Swiss Mac and Cheese was a HUGE hit.  Everyone else loved it.  But the other recipes……..  Let’s just start with what worked.

(This post has affiliate links marked with an *)

SWISS MAC AND CHEESE

All right this Swiss Mac and Cheese was easy. Well, relatively easy, especially since I’d made homemade Mac and Cheese before.

SWISS MAC AND CHEESE INGREDIENTS

• 1 large potato peeled and cubed into 1 inch cubes
• 1 box (1 pound) of macaroni pasta
• 2 large onions diced
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 1 pound of Gruyere cheese (this can be expensive, but it was soooo good), grated
• 1/2 cup milk or cream
• salt and pepper to taste
• aluminum foil* (is it just me, but does Amazon pricing seem high?)

LET’S PUT TOGETHER THIS YUMMY SWISS MAC AND CHEESE

As per usual, I have no pictures, because I didn’t remember, and I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

1. Get a pot of water boiling and your oven heating to 375 (in the Switzerland Adventure Pack* they’ve also got European measurements)
2. Heat the butter and cook the onions until soft
3. Cook the noodles and potatoes together (about 10-15 minutes) until tender
4. While that is happening combine the milk and salt/pepper
5. Once you’ve drained the noodles put half in a greased casserole dish* (I think I’ve had this dish for my entire 15 years of marriage, that is a miracle), and add half of the grated cheese.  Put in the rest of the noodle/potato mixture and sprinkle the rest of the cheese over it.
6. Cover with aluminum foil and cook for 10-15 minutes.
7. Serve to your children who will eat monstrous large amounts of food.

Swiss Mac and Cheese

Print

This Swiss man and cheese is a great addition to any recipe book as you cook around the world.

Prep Time 15 minutes

Cook Time 25 minutes

Total Time 40 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 large potato peeled and cubed into 1 inch cubes
• 1 box (1 pound) of macaroni pasta
• 2 large onions diced
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 1 pound of Gruyere cheese, grated
• 1/2 cup milk or cream
• salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

1. Get a pot of water boiling and your oven heating to 375.

1. Heat the butter and cook the onions until soft.
2. Cook the noodles and potatoes together (about 10-15 minutes) until tender.
3. While that is happening combine the milk and salt/pepper.
4. Once you’ve drained the noodles put half in a greased, and add half of the grated cheese.  Put in the rest of the noodle/potato mixture and sprinkle the rest of the cheese over it.
5. Cover with aluminum foil and cook for 10-15 minutes.

ZOPF, SWISS STYLE BREAD

I have no clue why this bread did not turn out the way it was supposed to.  I swear I followed the directions.

Future Ticia 2024 now has cooked a fair amount of bread, so let’s see where I think I went wrong.

• 2.2 pounds of white flour* (this might be where I went wrong, I don’t have a kitchen scale, so I googled and guesstimated)
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 package dry yeast* (good to know Amazon will not be driving HEB out of business anytime soon, the prices are definitely higher)> first hint, potentially my yeast was old
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 4.4 ounces butter, softened
• .7 quarts milk > next hint, maybe the milk needs to be heated (honestly that’s where I would go in fixing this to start)
• 1 yolk of egg diluted with water

Looking at the ingredient list I see where this went wrong.  I don’t have a kitchen scale, and so I’m pretty sure I was off on my measurements.

So, here we go….

1. Mix together flour, salt, yeast, butter, and milk.  Knead for 10 minutes, then let rise for an hour.
2. Come back an hour later, and see how the dough hasn’t really risen at all.
3. AT ALL.  Have a vague memory that yeast is heat-activated, so try putting the entire thing into the somewhat warm oven for 20 minutes.
4. Nothing happens.  Sigh.
5. Split the dough into two pieces and weave them together just like the directions say.  Then let it rise for an hour.
6. Yeah, it so didn’t rise.  It was just a big mass of flour.
7. Brush with the egg yolk and stick that baby in the over at 400 for an hour.
8. Pull it out and it looks good.
9. But man was that a thick bread.  It was not in the least bit light and fluffy.

SWISS COOKIES

I’m not sure what these were supposed to taste like.  The problem is they said they were “brownies,” and so in my head I was thinking brownies.  But these are a bit more cracker-like than brownie-like, so I don’t know what I was supposed to get.  Sigh.

• 5 ounces sugar (again, I’m beginning to think I should get that kitchen scale)
• 9 ounces ground almond (last time I saw this listed I threw up my hands right there, since then we’ve had a few new health stores move in, and the whole gluten-free thing has become a bigger deal, so weird flours are more common)
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 pinch of cloves and 1 pinch of salt
• 2 tablespoons cocoa powder (side note, did anyone else learn capital T means tablespoon and lowercase t means teaspoon?)
• 2 T flour (see, isn’t that easier to type?)
• 2 fresh egg whites (I used the eggs from my grocery store, no clue if they were “fresh” enough)
• 3.5 ounces bitter chocolate (I used unsweetened baker’s chocolate* (this price is finally about what I paid for it), and bought a whole new bar, because I’d just thrown out the old bar I’d had under the “I’m never going to use this”)

1. Mix the sugar, almond flour, spices, cocoa powder, and flour together
2. Add egg whites
3. Melt the chocolate, and mix it into the mixture while wearing COW PAJAMAS!
4. Roll it out and cut into shapes, at this point I was feeling rather tired and I just cut rectangles.  I know lazy Mom, this is why you’ll never see me featured on one of those Bento lunch blogs.
5. Let rest 5-6 hours!
6. Totally missed that, so it rested for an hour or so, and then we baked it for 5 minutes at 480 degrees.

I’m so doomed to never cook anything fancy right.  Ever. It sure looked amazing though, and tasted good, just never really rose.

I totally cheated for the cheese fondue, while the  Switzerland Adventure pack* had a cheese fondue I thought I could probably make at this point I was feeling all cooked out, and I bought a tub of cheddar beer soup, or maybe it was a dip.  All I know is the kids refused to touch it, and it did not taste as good as I’d hoped, so it ended up going to waste and we just ate the apple slices.

All in all, this was a very fun Switzerland unit, and I’m glad we got to do this version of a unit.