Homeschooling at Walt Disney World

We’ve wrapped up our learning activities for our January book club selection of “The Jungle Book”.  The kids’ reaction to our new book club format exceeded all of our expectations!

Here are a few additional things we did and learned on our journey –

We allowed each family to select a version of the book that worked for them — some read illustrated classics while others read the unabridged version.  This was a great way to allow everyone to read at a level that was appropriate for their family.

We had each child conduct their own research about the author and about the time period in which the story was written.  Our children are at an age where they are interested in putting everything on a timeline as this helps them to better visualize the time period and events that may have impacted the author and his story telling.

We included a writing assignment, for this lesson we had the children write a newspaper article about a scene in one of the stories.  They learned about the various elements of a newspaper article, selected the scene they wanted to write about and created their own dramatic and fact filled stories.  It was fun to see their interests and personalities come through as they described their favorite scenes.

One of the children’s favorite activities was experiencing different versions of the stories on CDs and as movies.  Of course we watched the Disney version of the Jungle Book (who doesn’t love the fun songs!) and we found the Chuck Jones Collection, an animated version of Mowgli’s Brothers and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.  We also enjoyed an audio CD version of the book by storyteller Jim Weiss.  We listed to the different versions of the stories and had great conversations about the similarities and differences of each presentation.

And of course we topped off our adventure with a trip to the Magic Kingdom and a ride on the Jungle Cruise.  Yes, I understand that the Jungle Cruise isn’t exactly based on The Jungle Book, but it was a fun way to wrap-up our lesson.  Since many of the silly jokes zoomed right past our kids, the moms enjoyed a few laughs while the kids gave names to all of the animals we saw along the journey.

I’m happy to say that our adventure was fun and educational.  We were able to bring a book to life and explore it for a month and as a result we will have many great memories to share!