Survival Homeschool Unit Study, Writing Prompts and Hatchet Novel Guide

This Survival Unit Study features two products to make a fun, engaging, and challenging unit study that your whole family can enjoy.

These 20 writing prompts focus on wilderness survival and cover all four main types of writing: expository, persuasive, narrative, and descriptive. It includes a wide range of writing prompts from creative and silly to serious and factual. The writing prompts cover wilderness survival topics of shelter, fire, hunting, fishing, foraging, gardening, and more. These writing prompts are a great way to start off your wilderness survival unit study, or can be used at the end of a study as a way to test their knowledge.

While the novel Hatchet by Gary Paulsen was not written as a how-to survival guide, it is a great fictional novel to use as the backbone of a survival unit study. The book is 19 chapters long, and for each chapter I have provided two different survival themes and activities to explore. Throughout the 38 activities, students will explore survival topics such as food, water, shelter, fire, herbal medicine, first aid, physical fitness, and mindset. There are also some STEM activities included that will encourage students to build things like a raft and spear.

This unit study and activity guide is intended for a homeschool classroom, as many of the activities take place outdoors, however you can also adapt the majority of the projects to indoors (for instance, building a popsicle stick raft inside rather than a raft with real sticks outdoors).

There is no answer key with this activity guide, as many of the answers will depend on the ecosystem of your local area. It is encouraged that you have multiple books on the plants and wildlife in your area, as well as first aid and survival books that you students can use to research the topics that are presented. Alternatively, the internet may be used to complete the research.