There are tons of literature opportunities for older students, but not as many for younger ones (outside of reading good books to them, of course). Today I get to review one such option: Paddington Bear from Branch Out World.
This unit study is based on the original Paddington picture book, and there are lessons to cover 5 days. It is available as a digital download and does not include the book. There are plenty of options for the book, though: you can likely find it at your library, it’s for sale on Amazon, and there’s even a narrated video for it on YouTube. For many reasons, we weren’t able to access the actual book, so we used the YouTube video (which is about 10 minutes long).
The study opens with notes for parents. This includes things such as how to keep and store your child’s work and what will be studied each day, as well as what you need in advance. There’s also a list of additional resources that can be used in conjunction with the picture book (the Paddington sequel, for example). Finally, there’s a comprehensive list of supplies you might need (based on which activities you choose to cover each day), separated by day.
After this section, you get to the heart of the study. Each day focuses on one aspect of the story (setting, words, pictures, science, and “crafts and more”). You read the story to your child each day (or in our case, have them watch the video), and then do the activities you’ve chosen. For the first day, where the focus is on the setting, it’s all about map work (physical setting) and making a timeline (the timing of the book). There are printables included for these activities in the appendix of the unit study. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t have easy access to our printer, so Small Fry and I used the digital versions of these for our studying. Adding the PDF to my iPad, I utilized the “marking up” feature in order to show him some of the locations of the story on the provided map.
Day 2, words, opens with a short biography of author Michael Bond and then moves on to the main themes of the book (primarily helpfulness, which is a great thing to focus on with little kids). There are also instructions for vocabulary and a basic grammar lesson. This was pretty much a discussion day for Small Fry and me.
Day 3, pictures, talks about the illustrator and his method of drawing (pen and ink colored with watercolors). Students are encouraged to create their own still-life of a bowl of fruit using either magazine cutouts or just by drawing.
On the science day, there are two experiments. One is edible and the other is not. Because Branch Out World is a British company, some of the necessary elements for these experiments are either unclear (washing liquid, for instance – I’m not sure what that is) or difficult to find in the US (like caster sugar – I know it’s a type of sugar that’s somewhere between granulated and powdered, but I’ve never seen it in the stores here). If you can’t find what you need, though, it’s not the end of the world – there’s also a nature study included that you could do instead.
The final day is for math, crafts, and more. Math activities include drawing parallel lines (railroad tracks) and finding the numbers in the pictures, amongst others. Then there are options for art projects and recipes to make together – including Paddington’s favorite, marmalade. We haven’t gotten to those yet.
Overall, this has been a very rewarding study for my 6-year-old. He’s enjoyed the activities (even if we stuck to the basic ones like studying the maps and drawing pictures), and it’s been a really good introduction to both unit studies and quality literature. I was initially a bit skeptical (for no good reason, unfortunately), but am glad to have been proven wrong. We really enjoyed working on this together!
I am so glad that he liked it! 🙂