Kimba Lapbook

 Ia has completed her short lapbook study of "Kimba" by Geoffrey Malone. The book is a wildlife story, fictional but portraying lions as realistic animals. No talking lions here! I read the story aloud to the girls, then did some follow up work on it with Ia.
These are the different booklets she made:
1. Characters book. In this she wrote a short description of each of the main characters.
2. "What will happen next?" This was a piece of creative writing continuing the story from the end of the book.
3. Adjective and verb flowers. Ia made a list of the adjectives which could be used to describe the lead character, Kimba, and a list of verbs to show what Kimba did.
4. Ia wrote a book review of her opinions on the story.
5. Rewriting an incident. For this piece of writing I found an incident in the story in which Kimba encounters men for the first time. The whole book is written in the third person, so Kimba's actions are described from the outside. In the incident where he encounters men Kimba's experience and reaction is very richly described, so I asked Ia to rewrite this extract of the book in the first person. I explained to her she would write as if she were Kimba, using "I". She needed to stick to the version of events as described in the book, but just tell it in "Kimba's own words".

As I said yesterday about the river project there is probably more I could have done with this book study, but I think it is usually better to stop before reaching the point where the child is totally fed up of the project! Overkill is definitely best avoided! I would rather move on to something else which is fresh and interesting than do a topic to exhaustion.
Overall  Ia enjoyed this variation to her English studies, alhamdulillah and I intend to do more of them in the coming academic year, inshAllah. I started book studies with the boys when they were year 4 (age 8-9).
Sometimes I do find that the writing suggestions in English textbooks are too detached and irrelevant. Book studies are one way of finding something more interesting to write about, inshAllah.