Literature Studies with Branch Out World {A Curriculum Review}

Believe it or not, prior to this review I had never read Paddington Bear. In fact, in order to work on this literature-based study from Branch Out World, I had to first get a copy of the book. I cannot remember reading this as a child, although I am sure my teachers read it. I did, however, know that this was a beloved children’s story and that my children love reading. So together with my eight-year-old son, our brand new copy of Paddington Bear, and the Picture Book Explorers packet, we set out on a brand new adventure.

A Little Background Information

Branch Out World is a UK-based company run by a homeschooler with more than 20-years of experience. Their website boasts many literature-based studies. On their website you can find lapbooks, picture book explorers, chapter book explorers, and more. Many of the selections have a UK connection, although not all of them do.

The Paddington Bear lit-study that we worked on is from their Picture Book Explorer series. These products are recommended for children ages 5-10 and contain many activities designed to allow you to dig into the book and learn more about the world around you. In fact, this packet contains more than 30 activities.

Jumping Right In

With our brand new copy of Paddington Bear and a digital file of the lit-study, my son and I set out to figure this out. The first thing I noticed, however, was that the packet itself was large – 69 pages in all. I read over the first few pages to get a feel for the product and learn how to use it. I decided that I would only print one of the five sections along with some of the additional pages needed to complete the day’s assignment.

One of my favorite things about the packet was that it was recommended that you read the book at the beginning of every lesson. The author of the lit-study recommends you complete one lesson or section per day, preferably within a one-week time frame. This reinforces the learning.

However, my son and I quickly learned two things on day one. First, we really enjoyed the story of Paddington Bear. Second, that there is a lot of activities in a daily lesson.

Day One is all about exploring the setting. This book takes place in London, England so that is the majority of the setting. However, the characters move about London starting in a train station, taking a taxi ride, and ending at The Brown’s home. Peru is also mentioned as that is where Paddington Bear is from. So we set out to learn a little about London, Britain, the UK, and Peru with some mapping activities and flag projects.

At this point, my son was losing interest and I was quickly realizing that while this packet might be great for other homeschool families, this was going to be challenging for us to complete. Between a very hectic summer schedule and a lack of love for project-based learning, we were in for a long week.

Continuing On

Other options in the day one section included making tourist posters for both England and Peru, researching the two countries, discussing migration, and working on a timeline. As my son was already weary with the day one activites we did complete, I decided that we would simply move on to day two. Day two is all about exploring words including themes, narration, and vocabulary. Included within this is a grammar lesson and some additional information about the book.

We started with rereading the story and quickly moved on to discussing themes. While the author of the lit-study recommends keeping a logbook, we decided to work on this orally. We talked about what a theme was and then simply chatted about helping. My son was able to bring up several examples of helping in the story and we talked about who was helping who and what would have happened if the character had not helped. This was a fun discussion and I was hopeful that things were looking up so we moved on to the next activity which was to write a story of his own. However, opting to focus on my child’s strengths we altered this and instead talked about his toys and tried to create a story around that. Instead, he ended up talking about the characters in a game he is currently playing with his brother.

Ok, so not quite on track but day two did technically go better than day one – a win in my book.

The Reality of the Situation

I’m not going to lie, at this point, I was more than a little concerned. While we were technically working on day two, we had completed less then half of the daily activites. In our family, we tend to steer clear of project-based learning and unit studies. I don’t know what to do with them and the kids generally have little interest in projects. We are an anomaly, I guess, in homeschooling families as we prefer a more traditional learning style keeping subjects neatly separated by subject. And while we love book studies, the Picture Book Explorers series is not so much a book study as it is a unit study.

Now, don’t get me wrong, here – this isn’t a bad product. In fact, the author clearly put a lot of detail and time into it. Within this packet, you can learn geography, history, study pictures and building architecture. You can study bears native to Peru, make your own marmalade, and even experiment with foam. There is a lot in this packet and for homeschoolers that enjoy this type of project-based learning, I am pretty sure it’s a great fit. There is an even a great discussion to be had about the differences in vocabulary and spelling between the United States and England. I even brought in some US history as we were coloring the map of the UK and talked about the Colonies and Revolutionary War. While coloring maps, my son reminded me that in Peru they have bad water, something he learned about last year.

Overall, though, we enjoyed the random discussions and the book itself over the packet.

Knowing When To Be Done

By day three it was very clear to me that this packet was not for us, and that really did disappoint me. Whenever I am reviewing a product I want to do all I can for the company and realizing that a product just isn’t working for us is a hard pill to swallow.

Day three is all about studying the pictures. Now, I just recently learned of picture studies and the idea intrigued me but I wasn’t sure if it was something that would be a good fit for our family. I only have one child interested in art (not the one who I was using this product with) and she’s not really into classic art. However, this gave us a great opportunity to try something new that I was curious about.

The idea for this was for my son to simply look at a specific picture from the story for a couple of minutes then tell me about it. Sounds easy enough so we set out to do this. He looked all around, his eyes quickly scanning the page. Surprisingly after a couple of minutes, he was able to tell me about the green house, the people in the window, the birds and trees, and even that Mr. and Mrs. Brown were on the previous page. As I was pretty confident that this was a win, we moved on to discussing the architecture of the building in the picture and this led to a discussion about some of the features of our home as well.

With a small feeling of success, we moved on to the discussion about art and principles of design. This was a huge fail for both of us. We are not artistic people, and that was coming through clearly. So instead, we simply went back to looking at the beautify illustrations in the book.

It’s Not Them, It’s Us

Although we had some great moments with this Paddington Bear lit-study from Branch Out World, they were not tied to the study itself. They were the side conversations that we went on while discussing history and architecture. Maybe that’s the point of a literature study – I really don’t know. I do know that for us, this overall wasn’t a good fit and by the time I got to looking at day four and five, we were worn and weary. My son was not interested in working on the packet, even simply doing a quick lesson on bears.

However, if your family enjoys unit studies and exploring things like settings, history, science, and art all from a picture book, I really think you should check out Branch Out World. Don’t let our lack of success hinder you from experiencing something new, because even though I’m not adding this particular product to our fall schedule we did learn and that is always a win.