Paddington Bear Study Guide
We recently had the opportunity to review the literature-based study guide by Branch Out World for the children’s picture book, Paddington Bear.
Branch Out World is based out of the United Kingdom, and as such, all of their chosen books for study guides have a link to the UK. This provides a great opportunity, especially for those not within the UK, to tie in a literature unit with geography study.
The study guide came as a pdf file. The first part of the guide gives the instructions and activities to do and the last half is the printables that go along with certain activities.
The guide is broken up into five days. Each day you read the book aloud to your child and then do the chosen activities for that day. Because the guide is written with family in mind, it is meant to appeal to a range of ages. For us, this meant that my five year old could do some of the simpler activities, while my older children worked on some of the more age appropriate tasks. For example, in the first lesson, I had my older daughter and son do the map work and page on Immigration vs. Emigration while my five year old colored pictures of the Peru and United Kingdom flags. This helped my older kids not feel like they were doing “baby” work, while still holding the interest of their younger sister.
I will say that my older kids tired quickly of reading the book daily. However, I feel my younger daughter really benefited from the repetition to help her see and remember more of the details. Since my older kids had better comprehension and could remember the details of the story, we ended up with me just reading it to my younger daughter and my older kids joining in for the lessons. You could also choose to spread it out a little bit, especially if you choose to do more of the activities, so then you are not reading the book every day, but every other day, twice a week, etc. Another option would be after the first full reading to just read the pages that are applicable to the activities you will be doing.
One of the things that I was really impressed with was the variety of topics covered in this guide. I wouldn’t have thought of half the things included and it really made for an in depth study. Day one covers the setting where you learn more about England and Peru, do some map work and learn a little about migration. Day two focuses on themes, such as helping, and vocabulary and grammar. Day three focuses on the pictures, including some architectural vocabulary. Day four is all about science and includes some fun play with shaving cream. Day five has some math and crafts, including making marmalade and strawberry tarts. We chose to buy ours this time around, but the kids still had fun with it.
There were multiple activities included in each day for you to choose from. Some were geared toward more older students, while others appealed to younger ones. Depending on what you chose or the interest level of your child, there were many opportunities for further exploration on your own, where the activity becomes the jumping off point to pique their interest.
We celebrated the end of the unit with jammy dodgers and “tea,” aka, juice. It made for a fun ending to a super cute book.
