Paddington Bear…. doesn’t that bear just make you smile? Today, for my review, I have a unit study, from Branch Out World, that will help you dig deeper into the world of Paddington Bear and the places he has been. Fly with me from the deep, dark forests of Peru to the city lights of London. Along the way we’ll discover art, architecture, story-telling, language arts and more.
Who is Branch Out World?
Branch Out World is brain child of a homeschooling family located in the United Kingdom. Having a deep love of books, they wanted to share that love with others and to that end have created literature-based unit studies as well as lapbooks. They are geared to be used by the whole family. Their unit studies have a UK link, the lapbooks are more globally oriented.
What do you Get?
I received a 69 page PDF of Paddington Bear, a literature based unit study. It’s connected to the picture book of Paddington Bear.
You could, if you wanted get through all five days, it’s quite doable, or you could spread it over a longer period. 🙂 A weekly schedule is included, explaining the how and what of each day’s planned activities.
In this literature study you will find lapbook elements such as the one below, along with lists showing what supplies you’ll need every day.
A sample day (I’m choosing day three) has the following options to do with your students.
- Learn about the artist
- Picture study based on page 31 in the picture book
- Learn about architectural features. We went to youtube and looked up specific examples online. Later we went for a walk and talked about the different features we learned about in the houses we saw. This was fun to do!
- Principles of Design – overlapping… my son declined to do this project, but we did talk about how shadows would be different depending on where the fruit was placed and that helps show depth and placement.
- Principles of Design – Emphasis. My son did this project using a huge spider in the foreground. I’ve a picture of it below.
As you can see, lots to do on any given day. Depending on your student this could take 1/2 an hour or a couple of hours. You could easily expand the projects or shorten them down to just the basics.
All the information and lapbook elements are found at the end of the study.
How We Used Paddington Bear:
I offered to get the book for my 13 year old to read and he turned me down flat. We had the option of watching the book being read, but mostly we just sat down and looked through the options for extended learning. He dove right into learning about the Spectacled bear… telling me all about what he learned about them, showing me one of the videos he watched, and showing me on our globe where they live.
He also grabbed onto the idea of learning some architectural terms, and even drew a picture showing emphasis. It was so interesting watching what elements he gravitated toward and knowing that this study would please so many students. You certainly don’t have to do everything in the lesson plan, you can pick what your students are most interested in (or what you deem most important) and learn about the world at large through a great picture book about Paddington. I have to admit to being a bit annoyed with myself, I had a couple of different elements put together and I can’t find them AND I failed to get a picture of them. I only have the picture of this one element….the drawing for emphasis.
My Thoughts:
I have to admit, my son is a bit beyond the Paddington years, so we picked up this review so that I could look at it for those that DO like Paddington. I was impressed. A good variety of activities and interesting topics to look at. Even my non-Paddington son found things of interest. If you are a lover of all things Paddington OR doing a larger unit study on bears and want to have a literary tie in, this book will provide a good way to do that. 🙂
I was browsing through the Picture Book Explorers series and saw the Mousehole Cat. That sounds like a fun book to read and then explore. What one would intrigue you?
Paddington Bear
Branch Out World
Picture Book Explorers series
69 pages, PDF, 5-10 years old.
lit-based unit studies, topic pack, home education resources, homeschool resources
65 members of the Homeschool Review Crew had a chance to utilize this study. Please read our reviews.
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