The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Unit Study Part 1

C and I have officially dived into our unit study on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  I let her choose the subject because she didn't like my ideas.  We were at the library and I saw a bunch of fun fairy tale books but she thought that she was "too big" to study fairy tales.  (She is only six!) I suggested a few other ideas and she wasn't impressed, so I let her choose.  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was her choice.  We've read the book together before and we've seen the movie but we haven't done any lessons focused on the book so I was excited.  I love so many books by C.S. Lewis and who doesn't love the Narnia series? 

Prior to getting started, I searched the internet for ideas.  I shared some of my favorites in a round up post which I will link to at the bottom of this post.  Many of the activities we will do throughout this unit study will stem from those sources.  We have had a lot of fun so far and I am so excited to share with you!  For some chapters we did extra activities and for others we have only completed the lapbook pages.  We are using the lapbook from Homeschool Share.  There are a lot of pieces in this lapbook, I initially made a double lapbook and still will need to add additional space for everything.  This is a free resource so I highly recommend it!

An Introduction to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Before we started reading, we took a couple days to introduce C.S. Lewis, fantasy stories, England, and WWII.  We didn't do too many activities for this, mostly we just read from books I found at the library.  The books we used were:

• Writers Uncovered: C.S. Lewis by Vic Parker
• Fun and Easy Drawing: Fantasy Characters by Rosa M. Curto
• Kids Write! Fantasy & Sci Fi, Mystery, Autobiography, Adventure & More! by Rebecca Olien
• Why did the Whole World Go to War? and other questions about...World War II by Martin W. Sandler

C enjoyed all of these resources!  We didn't read the entire C.S. Lewis biography, we just skimmed for interesting information.  She loved the ideas in Kids Write! for sparking creativity.  They have crafts and activity suggestions to help you come up with a story idea for the genre you are working on.  For fantasy stories, one the of the ideas was to build a castle out of cardboard so you can play around with it and come up with a story line.  We did build the castle, unfortunately I don't have a picture of it.  We both enjoyed drawing fantasy characters with the drawing book.  I usually don't draw more than a stick figure so I was very proud of my dragon. ;) 

I really loved the book, Why did the Whole World Go to War?  by Martin W. Sandler.  It had a lot of great information that C was able to understand, without graphic details or images.  It also specifically addressed the evacuation of children in England.  This is evacuation is the whole reason the children end up at the professors house so I wanted to include a bit about WWII in our study. 

I was planning on including the introduction and the first few chapters in one post, but before I knew it, I had a whole post just on the introduction.  I will write up a post on the first few chapters very soon!  I've added some helpful links to the bottom of this post, enjoy!

• The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe Idea Round Up
• The Homeschool Share lapbook
• My Narnia Resources Amazon Store 

 Have you read any of the Narnia books with your children?  I'd love to hear how they liked it, please leave me a comment! :) Thank you so much for visiting Joy Focused Learning!

~Angela