How do you engage your elementary age children in learning when they would rather play? You find fun activities to explore and learn through. And if you can center it all around a good story, well, that’s a recipe for success. At least in our family. We have been exploring many topics related to the well-loved story of Paddington Bear by Michael Bond. We have been using the picture book version illustrated by R.W. Alley. I didn’t just randomly find the activities, I took the easy way. We’ve been utilizing Picture Book Explorers – Paddington, a literature-based unit study from Branch Out World.
We had recently checked the audiobook of the longer chapter book from the library. We had not yet begun listening when we received this literature study for review. We are not strangers to literature studies. Especially those where we use a wonderfully written picture book as the basis. My 10-year-old daughter and I were eager to work through this together. We quickly borrowed the proper picture book as well. My daughter is working on her reading fluency so this was excellent practice for her. We read this beautifully illustrated storybook five times in the course of our study. I read the first day completely then we worked on building her up to read the book completely herself. This was a great confidence-builder for her. We need to employ this more often.
Once we downloaded the pdf file, we started looking through the layout and supplies needed. The unit study for this picture book is meant to be spread over five days. As you go through each day and select the activities you wish to do, there will be things to print or ingredients to gather – yes, there is some cooking and baking – our favorite. We had not yet decided if we would assemble a lapbook for this study or do additional studies and keep them all in a binder, notebook style. We printed some of the mini-books and will determine how and where to keep them later.
The five days each have a different focus. Day one is spent exploring the setting with history and geography; day two explores language arts with grammar and creative writing as well as learning about the author. On day three we explored the pictures and learned about the illustrator. Day four was the day for exploring science; and day five was spent exploring crafts and recipes. We did not do our activities on consecutive days, simply because we don’t school five days in a row. We spent three days the first week then two on the second week. Each day we began with reading the story.
On the first day, we chose to spend more time learning about migration. With the topic of immigration coming up in current events, this answered many questions my girl had. We also did some map work and she read various facts about both England and Peru. “Darkest Peru” is, after all, where Paddington Bear has come from.
On the second day of Paddington… (did you read that to the tune of 12 days of Christmas?) We first looked at other books by the author of Paddington, Michael Bond. Then we discussed the theme, helping others. I love gently introducing grammar to my younger children (rather than intentional lessons). A scene gave some excellent examples that illustrated a grammar concept so we used the provided mini book and discussed that as well. Then we talked about the differences we noticed in the picture book vs the audiobook (the first few chapters are roughly the same as the picture book) vs the movie. We chose not to do much writing on this day though there are a few opportunities.
Art day is what we called the third day of our study. We did a picture study using an illustration from the book as well as learned some architectural terms, also using an illustration from the book. Because specific images are used from the book, the proper edition is a must for these activities. We used the edition from HarperCollins with the illustrations copyright 2007. My daughter also did the art activity for overlapping. She had fun with this and could really see this design principle once she started moving the layers for her still life.
For the science day we learned about spectacled bears and made one of the recipes. There are a few other activities you could choose from. That is one of my favorite things about this Picture Book Explorers unit study, there are so many activities you can pick and choose which ones to do. We will likely come back to some of these science activities and include the boys, too.
On the last day of our study, we had many activities to choose from. Some of these are perfect for younger children, exploring parallel lines with train tracks, etc. Again we chose activities that involve food – this is my youngest daughter who loves to spend time in the kitchen, so this was perfect for her. We made a tweaked version of the strawberry tarts. The one recipe we didn’t get to that we will soon, is making marmalade. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait long for good-looking oranges to purchase. Once we have our marmalade we’ll have another tea party with marmalade on toast.
In looking at the other picture book studies and the (currently, I hope) only chapter book study, you will notice that British stories are used. That is because the creator of these great studies is a homeschool mom from the United Kingdom. We consider ourselves to be Anglophiles so were not put off by some of the ingredients or terms used. If something isn’t clear, Google can pretty quickly clear it up. Alas, we have nothing near as good as the double cream called for in the tart recipe.
All Crew members reviewed this same unit study, but there are numerous other titles available. To see the reviews (which will show some of the other activities) simply click the image below.
