Our World Travel with Paddington Bear (Review)

Last month my children enjoyed a week following Paddington Bear‘s adventures while traveling to London and Peru. This Branch Out World literature study includes art, science, math, and geography activities. Information about the author, illustrator, and countries are also included.

Branch Out World was created by a home educating family with over 20 years of memories and experience. Their Picture Book Explorers packs are literature-based unit studies that can be used with all your children simultaneously. The activities included are able to be tailored to use with various aged children. Since the company is based out of West Yorkshire the chosen books all have a link to the United Kingdom, via either the author, illustrator, or setting.

The Paddington Bear Picture Book Explorers pack is a digital product. After your purchase, an email will be sent with your direct download link. The PDF file contains over 60 pages of printables including timeline, mini-books, maps, supply and resource list, as well as study suggestions to help you make this fit your homeschool. Detailed instructions for the projects and lesson plans are also provided. The file worked fine, printed to scale, and all the graphics looked great.

Initially, I thought this particular Paddington Bear study would only work for my younger two due to the book choice. However, with some tweaking my 3, 4, and 10-year-olds participated, remained fully engaged, and learned a lot during this week. We followed the provided lesson plans but added a few activities to each day so we would finish by Thursday. On Friday, we watched the Paddington movie and enjoyed the sequel on the following Monday.

Here is my list of dos and don’ts for using this literature study:

• DO pick up geography books, maps, travel brochures, or atlas books about Peru, England, and London. These make the settings come alive all the more. We also watched a couple of YouTube videos about the areas.

• DO NOT skip out on the map work for your younger children. Bam Bam and Princess may not understand every part of the map but giving them opportunities to look for the locations, learn about migration, and hear about major cities and landmarks.
• DO have an older sibling read the story to the younger children. They will listen to you but having their older brother or sister reading to them is priceless. I used this time on the first day to prepare our activities.
• You DO NOT have to purchase this book. This book can be found at your local library, on Hoopla, and is even read aloud on YouTube.

• DO have a copy of A Bear Called Paddington for your older children to read. We all listened to the book via Hoopla on Tuesday through Thursday. The book is only approximately 200 pages which is a little over two hours of audio. The recommended story is perfect for younger children but Bear preferred the lengthier version.

• DO NOT skip vocabulary at all! The vocabulary was easy for Bear so I added some words and used the list as our spelling for the week. Princess and Bam Bam were so excited to have spelling words. FYI: Little children love learning BIG words

• DO try the foods mentioned in the book and provided in the packet. I was ill while we used this so my snacks were a bit “creative” but the children enjoyed them nonetheless.

• You DO NOT have to make all the snacks from scratch. Cooking is so much fun but not every mom wants to add it to her already full plate. To aid in prep for the week I added a jar of Orange Marmalade, frozen pastry tarts, Brazil nuts, individually bagged popcorn, raisins, and strawberry filling to our grocery list. With these items, snack preparation didn’t take long and the cool kids still tasted items from both countries.

• Lastly, DO the science experiments because they are so much fun. You just can’t go wrong with shaving cream based projects for any age.

I was so grateful for these ready-made lessons because I was extremely sick during our time using this. I taught most of this from my bed or the kitchen when I had enough energy to barely climb out of my resting place. Even though I was not 100%, my children enjoyed every moment. I definitely plan on doing this again and I will make sure we take lots of pictures.

The cool kids enjoyed our five-day exploration through Peru and London England with Paddington Bear. Branch Out World did a good job creating a literate study filled with activities for various aged children. This study would be perfect for preschool to early elementary children in a homeschool, daycare, or classroom setting.

Be sure to click on the traveling, okay stationary, photo below to read other Crew reviews on this product.

Make this week adventurous,

Ta’Neisha K.