Enjoy a Paddington Bear Unit Study

We are big picture book lovers in our home, so I was curious to check out one of the Picture Book Explorer Packs from Branch Out World: Paddington Bear when it came up for review.

Made for Homeschoolers by a Homeschooler

This literature-based unit study is aimed at children ages 5-10, but appropriate for a wider range, too.  It comes as a downlaodable pdf, so you can use it with all your children at once - printing copies of maps, mini-books, and more for each child to complete - or with one child now and another child later.   

Obviously, the study's creator Helen Royston gets that homeschool families appreciate the freedom of being able to ethically print as many copies of the study materials as necessary for family use.  That may be because Helen is a 25+ year homeschool veteran herself.

Like all Picture Book Explorer Packs, the Paddington Bear one has a link to the United Kingdom and provides fun and learning for families.

What Will You Find Yourself Doing During This Unit Study?

Used as designed, you read the picture book Paddington by Michael Bond (ISBN 978-0007236336) over five consecutive days and choose accompanying activities from the study to complete.  These activities are grouped, daily, by subject area:

• Day 1 – Exploring the Setting:  You can learn about England and Peru, do mapwork, create timelines, make a mini-book about the pushes and pulls of migration, and more.
• Day 2 – Exploring the Words:  You can read about the author of Paddington Bear Michael Bond, chat about themes, encourage narration, make a vocabulary pocket, spotlight subject-verb agreement, focus on characterization, and adapt stories for different audiences.
  
  
  
  
  
• Day 3 – Exploring the Pictures:  You can learn about the illustrator R.W. Alley, do a picture study of one of the book's illustrations, chat about and/or make a mini-book of architectural features, learn about principles of design and try your hand at overlapping and creating emphasis through the use of color, leading lines, contrast, and position - studying an illustration from the book and, then, creating your own artwork.
• Day 4 – Exploring Science: You can learn about spectacled bears and fill out a fact sheet if you like, learn about shaving cream, create edible and nob-edible foam, explore steam and do nature study in your garden.
  
  
  

• Day 5 – Exploring Math, Crafts and More: You can explore parallel and perpendicular lines (in connection with train tracks), play around with numbers spotted in the book, explore spatial awareness with packing (in reality or with a paper template), make shaving foam art, create a cultural craft, cook up recipes, and more.

Truly, if unit studies are your family's favored style of learning, this one is excellently written - providing information and ideas that you might not readily find elsewhere and helping your children make connections while also making memories.

There are over 30 activities described in the book and pages and pages of printables including timelines, mini-books, maps, flags, and notebooking pages.  There are also handy lists of needed supplies and book and film go-alongs. It is a well-written study.

It is also one that can be used flexibly!


How Did We Use This Study So Far?

My children and our lifestyle do not currently accommodate sitting down and reading the same picture book day after day for five days.  Nor are we able to spend time this summer diving into loads of Paddington-inspired activities.

What we have been able to do is cuddle on the couch with a picture book in hand and a unit study nearby on a laptop creen during a few particularly rainy days when other plans have been cancelled. 

As such, we have enjoyed reading together, then, using portions of the unit study pdf on-screen to help guide chatter about the book's author, the illustrator, certain pictures, art and design techniques, and more.

We have also pulled up the included maps and named South America and the United Kingdom, found London and Peru, etc.  (Because we are in a constant battle against paper piles here and simply do not want to print more things that will increase their depth, we chose to do many of the activities in this study through discussion and pointing onscreen rather than through printing, coloring, cutting, and writing.)

We have opted to forgo some of the messier or more time-consuming experiments and recipes included in the study for the time being, but have read through them and are looking forward to trying some out during colder, less busy seasons.

However, because we do like hands-on things, we have not delayed all the fun!

Indeed, we opted for some hands-on art and math -which has been enjoyable (and easier to clean up then science and cooking at this juncture in life!)

We have also borrowed a stack of other Paddington books from our local library to use for free reading and 1:1 reading times and have been happy to revisit the character that we spent time with previously when my oldest was younger.

Without question, as we have revisited Paddigton using our Branch Out World: Paddington Bear, we have made new connections. 

We have also been able to apply ideas from the study - such as those we practiced on layering and emphasis - in making cards for a sick friend.

This was a fun endeavor that made the study more valuable to us.

For, in our homeschool endeavors, even more valuable than a lesson learned in connection to a piece of literature, is a concept or skill we can incorporate into daily life.

Inspired by the conversations we had during unit study activities about themes in the book - such a being kind to others...

And, knowing a dear little baby we know is in the hospital with a very serious condition, and we'd be blessed to see his siblings, we decided to step away from just drawing fruits as suggested in the unit study, and, to apply art and design ideas to creating cards with well wishes instead...

I just love that things discussed and focused on with the study transferred to life so easily.

Helen Royston did a wonderful job researching and presenting information, activities, and ideas for this study.  I truly appreciate how this homeschool resource could provide a full week's worth of homeschool studies or can be used flexibly in the time life allows for it.

Of course, is you are a picture book and unit study lover with elementary-aged children Branch Out World: Paddington Bear  is ideal. 

Learn More

Some of the other Homeschool Review Crew families dove into all of the activities in this unit study 100% and have wonderful photos and thoughts to share.  Be sure to click through to find their reviews.

Read all of the reviews!

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Feast, Learn, and Enjoy Sensory Activities for Saint Patrick's Feast Day

This week, our Art-Music-Poetry club friends will be joining us to celebrate Saint Patrick's feast day.  As I plan forward for that celebration, I have been looking back at the past few year's of Saint Patrick's Day food, fun, and learning that we've been involved with.  In doing so, I realized that I never shared about our simple 2015 celebrations nor our sensory-smart 2014 ones.  So, I am doing so now.  I pray that you are inspired by the menu items, resources, sensory activities, and learning fun we enjoyed.

{Disclosure: This post includes affiliate links to Amazon, CCC of America, Holy Heroes. and Knowledge Quest. If you click through them to make any purchase, we may receive small income at no extra cost to you, which we put straight back into training our children up and sharing about it here.}

Simple St. Patrick's Feast Day Celebrations in 2015 

Last year, regularly scheduled activities had us so busy on Saint Patrick's feast day that we kept our observances of the day fairly simple.When the children woke, they discovered materials on our living room table which would allow them to make St. Patrick Paper Dolls and Pop-Up Scenes with thanks to Drawn 2B Creative. 



I managed to snap one fuzzy photograph of my two early-birds enjoying the paper-doll making activity but, unfortunately,forgot to take pictures of their finished dolls and scenes.

Once my third child woke, we all enjoyed a themed feast day breakfast, which included:

• "pot-o-gold" juice,
• "emerald isle green" foods,
• and "rainbow" fruit.

I cannot honestly recall what recipe I used for our "shamrock green" gluten-free pasta, but I do recall Daddy and I liked it a whole lot better than the children did.

Luckily, two of the three kids loved the crispy kale chips I made, and they all found produce to enjoy in our annual fruit rainbow.

Decorating our table were a few Saint Patrick books, a green candle, some paper decorations made by the kids, and a shamrock candle holder that my sweet niece made and gifted to us.

Over breakfast, we shared some extra prayers and began reading two of our favorite Saint Patrick's Day books, Patrick, Patron Saint of Ireland and Saint Patrick, which we finished later in the day.

  

Then, it was off for full day of activities outside our home, plus some time enjoying wintry weather in the yard, before we cuddled up to view the super-cute, child-friendly CCC video Saint Patrick, Brave Shepard of the Emerald Island.

My children just love such sweet CCC films, and I cannot recommend them enough.

 

Finally, the children and I read through some of our other favorite Saint Patrick's day read alouds that day and over the next few days. 

Celebrating Despite Sorrow - and with Plenty of Sensory Fun -  in 2014

The week of Saint Patrick's Day was a tough one for us in 2014, since it was when we lost and buried my sweet niece.  To help my children cope through the sorrow of losing their cousin, I tried to keep some things as normal as possible for them between all of the extra prayers, extended-family time, and services that followed my niece's death.  Two of these things were celebrating the saints we typically do and participating in a Sensing the Saints co-op I had organized with some friends.

Saint Patrick's Day itself was rather heartbreaking as it was the day of my niece's wake.  Still, I managed to put together a feast day breakfast, which, although watered with intermittent tears, helped my young children maintain some sense of "normalcy" during an abnormally sorrow-filled time.

For breakfast, we decorated the table with candles and had themed foods as we often do.  

We talked about the Trinity symbolism of clovers (and the superstition of lucky 4-leaf clovers, since my pepper slices had "four leaves").  The eggs were a but, the peppers, not so much.

Since making gluten-free Irish soda bread is cumbersome, and this truly was a toss-together-with-what-we-have-in-the-house feast day breakfast, I simply served frozen GFCF bread with the meal, which the children enjoyed, even if they did not make "pot-o-gold" egg and "emerald isle green" baby spinach sandwiches with it as I thought they might.  

They did however,enjoy reading about Saint Patrick in our copy of Loyola Kids Book of Saints. 

They also readily partook in extra prayer time and a later-in-the-day snack of our traditional produce "rainbow"...

an "Irish flag" made of produce...

and a macaroon Celtic cross, which got knocked about and partly-eaten before I snapped a photo of it...

Such festive feast-day foods helped take the edge off the weighty sorrow the children and I were experiencing.

Another day during the week, precious friends took still more edge off for us when they gifted me time to go to Adoration by myself for a short while to pray while simultaneously offering my children a break from focusing on our loss by engaging them in a super-fun morning of learning and sensory activities inspired by Saint Patrick and the country he is patron to.  

I remain ever-grateful to the ladies that joined our Sensing the Saints co-op with for their prayers and support during my family's difficult time of loss and now smile as I look back at photographs from the day and recognize all the love and light my children shared in despite the otherwise dark time it was for us.

The Saint Patrick's Day co-op day, which was planned, prepped, and facilitated by a friend I so cherish, started off with a circle time, where that friend read two of my family's yearly St. Patrick's read alouds, Saint Patrick and St. Patrick and the Three Brave Mice (which happens to be selling for only a penny right now!)  They also played a game with the bell.

After that, the children proceeded onto choice activities, which included:

...using their gustatory and olfactory senses to taste-test different "emerald isle" green foods....

...using fine motor skills and exercising their tactile senses while making "rainbow" kebabs.

...working on patterning while also using fine motor skills, plus their tactile and visual senses while making snakes...

...enjoying more tactile, visual, and fine motor fun painting snakes and rainbows with toothpicks and mini-marshmallows...

...and using tactile senses and fine motor skills while sorting and graphing cereal pieces using free printables which no longer seem to be available online.

(You can however find similar printables to the one pictured below that we used if you Google "Lucky Charms graphing".)

After choice time, it was onto science time, where the children made green and, the, rainbow colors with the same experiment we had enjoyed when reviewing Amazing Science, Volume 1.

This experiment never fails to fascinate children (and their visual sense)...

The experiment is also great for the kids' pincer grasps!

Finally, the children made flubber.  Luke chose to make St. Patrick's original traditional color (blue) as opposed to his nowadays one (green.)

Being able to see his smile amidst the sorrow of the week was so precious to me.

Knowing my children were nourished body and soul meant so much!

Our Sensing the Saints St, Patrick's Day co-op day sure was a light for us that week!

Free Printable Unit Study

This year, my children's focus when celebrating Saint Patrick with friends will not be on sensory activities, but on art, music, and poetry, as well as, of course, prayer and feasting.  We'll also be enjoying some learning activities since I saw this FREE St. Patrick unit study that Knowledge Quest is offering right now, which has pieces we can easily weave into our week. 

I just love when folks like those at Knowledge Quest bless others forward by sharing simple-to-use, faith-(and-history!)-based free printables.  I am not a whiz at printable making, but pray that by sharing photos and explanations of how we celebrate feast days, I may bless you in some way as well.

May your Saint Patrick's Day be rich in blessings.  Saint Patrick, pray for us.