Spiderwick Themed Study

♥ These are the Ideas we brainstormed last week ☺ for our Spiderwick study

♥♥Resources♥♥

♥The Spiderwick books:
- 1) The Field Guide
- 2) The Seeing Stone
- 3) Lucinda's Secret
- 4) The Ironwood Tree
- 5) The Wrath of Mulgarath
- Care and Feeding of Sprites
- Arthur Spiderrwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You
- The Chronicles of Spiderwick: A grand Tour of the Enchanted World, Navigated by Thimbletack

♥ Other books related to the Study:
- How to draw and Paint Fairies...Linda Ravenscroft
- Blue skies, Green Days
- The Burgess Big Book of Flowers (if we can get it)
- The Fairy Series ... Margaret Tarrant
- the Flower Fairy Collection... Cecily Mary Barker
- The Gnome Series books and the Large Gnome Book... Rein Poortuliet and Wil Huggen
- The Rainbow Goblins...
- Fairy House books...
- Shirley Barber books
- Puck the Gnome...
- Catkin...
- Gnomes and Gardens...Nigel Suckling
- The Story of the Root Children, Butterfly Children, Wind Children, Snow Children and the Princess in the Forest... Sybille Von Olfers
- My Side of the Mountain...Jean Craig George
- One Small Square Series
- Fairy Tales: Grim, Anderson, Lang and from other lands
- Naturalist Biographies and works

♥ Read and provide a report on these books

♥ For Independent Reading:
- 5 Children and it
- The Amulet
- The Phoenix and the Carpet
- The Enchanted Castle...... all by E. Nesbit

♥ Beyond Spiderwick
- The Nixie's Song
- A Giant Problem

♥ The Spiderwick Chronicles DVD

♥ Find out about various Fairy Folk from different countries.
- narrate and illustrate

♥ Research Fencing:
- History of
- modern times
- basic moves

♥ Make your own field guide

♥ Collect your own Insect collection

♥ Make an acrostic from Spiderwick and Chronicles

♥ Make up your own quiz

♥ Make snap cards

♥ Make Spiderwick quiz cards

♥ Write a story using fairy folk complete with illustrations

♥ Do a puppet show: Create your own backdrop, scenery, props and puppets.
-Write a script for the puppet show.

♥ Learn Fairy poems and rhymes

♥ Leave milk out for a Brownie

♥ Make a lifesize troll or Goblin and then use it for target practise and fencing practise( like the "buster you have made before"

♥ Geometry: do the various geometry exercise from the maths books( check with me which I would like you to do)

♥ Form drawing: work through the books we have working up to the difficult Celtic knot ones.

♥ Make a "Fairy Folk" activity book for the younger children: include things like
- colouring pages
- mazes
- dot to dot
- spot the differences
- word searches
- crosswords etc.

♥ copy the Spiderwick map

♥ make a fairy treasure chest
- fill with fairy treasure

♥ From our own property - draw map and assign fairy folk to each area

♥ What fairy folk are you? Create characteristics for each type

♥ Make Characters from felt, wood, felted and sewn or other means

♥ Beeswax Theatre Use Evolgia as an example.

♥ Research dumbwaiters and build a miniature one

♥ Research and grow your own mushrooms
- visit mushroom farm down the road
- Also identification of the mushrooms that grow on our property
- Draw and identify from Mushroom and toadstool book

♥ Research recycling; what is recycled, what happens to it, how is it reused etc


♥ Botany: (using the resources from the weekly botany Studies)
- Herbs and their uses
- Herbs in medicine
- Herbs in cooking

♥ Botany books:(still in progress with books)
- Handbook of Nature Study: Anna Botsford Comstock
- Shanleya's Quest... Thomas J. Elpel
- Botany in a Day...Thomas J. Elpel
- Exploring Creation with Botany...Fulbright
- Nature Journaling...Clare Walker Leslie
- The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady... Edith Holden
- The Edwardian Lady... Edith Holden
- Painting Nature in Pen and Inkwith Watercolour... Claudia Nice
- The Sierra Club Guide to Sketching in Nature...Cathy Johnson
- A Kids Herb Book...Leslie Tierra
- Australian and New Zealand Concise Book of Herbs.... Henry B. Cryan
- Christopherus Unit Study: Botony... Donna Simmons
- Montessori for Everyone: Lifecycle of Pumpkin, Apple and Spring Matching Cards
♥ Paint 5 paintings with Fairy folk in them

♥ Look at old houses in Victorian times and the secret passages etc.
- were they all similar in different parts of the wold eg, Britain. USA and Australia
- draw and design an old house with secret passages and attics etc.

♥ Look at the Fairy Houses books
- what are the materials used , can you draw a design of one or more of them.

♥ Make Fairy Houses and the small items for a fairy house.

♥ Read the fairy tale books we have, eg Grimms, Hans Christian Anderson, Tales form Italy etc and the Andrew Lang tales books
- make a list of the ones you read and a short summary of the Fairy tale

♥ List what would be in a fairy folk survival kit
- then make a miniature one that a small doll or "fairy folk" you have made can use

♥ "Fairy Medicine"

♥ Draw different types of fairy's using the sketching guides we have: Particularly-
how to draw and paint Fairies
- use the different techniques so you cover a broad varieties of mediums.

♥ Make a Dragon out of any material and write about it.
- Find out about dragon lore from various sources.
- draw and label different dragons from around the world (use Autumn's calender for this)

♥ Grow different types of tomatoes- do this at the start of the study so you can harvest and use your own tomatoes for the tomato sauce you make

♥ Make tomato Sauce

♥ Learn about Honey
- Magic tree house book
- Read honey books
- visit bee Farm
- Watch -The Bee Movie: How true is this to actual Honey production
- how has honey production changed over the years
- how have bee hives changed
- make a miniature bee Hive



♥ Create your own Fantasy world and make up characters with specific names and roles eg. Albania
- write and illustrate providing a map as well

♥ Research Famous Naturalists- Provide a written and illustrated account of their lives:
- Matthew Flinders
- Amy Mack
- May Gibbs
- Beatrix Potter
- Cecily Mary Barker
- Ernest Thompson Seton
- Henry David Thoreau
- Sterling North
- Thornton Burgess
- Gene Stratton Porter
- Edith Holden
- William Barton
- James Audubon
- Clare Walker Leslie
- any other naturalists you can find

♥ Plan your ideal garden: either vegetable or flowers of mixture and find out about the plants.

♥ Press flowers and herbs
- use these in various decorative plans eg, book marks, to decorate theme pages in your study.

♥ DVD's
- The Spiderwick Chronicles
- Shrek 1, 2, 3,
- Fairytale: a True Story
- Peter Pan- various versions
- The Lord of the Rings series
- Eragon

♥ Nature DVD's
- Beatrix Potter
- Tasha Tudor

♥ Audio Tapes:
- The Secret of the Unicorn
- Beatrix Potter
- Shirley Barber
- Ernest Thompson Seton Downloads from Gutenberg

♥ A Spiderwick Theme Party

♥ Do some of the work pages from Below

♥ Other Great Ideas
-This is from Therese at Lapaz Home learning

Tony DiTerlizzi's Blog for information about the books

-Great Activity pages on the Spiderwick home page.



Blessings ,