Last week we finished reading Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, a work of historical fiction based on a true story of an American Indian woman who spent 18 years in isolation on San Nicolas Island, one of eight Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. (Read more about the true story at the NPS website.) We used Notebooking Nook’s Island of the Blue Dolphins Mini-Books and Notebooking Pages to capture the majority of our Language Arts activities for this book. This has been an EXCELLENT resource for our family. It’s a stand-alone resource for completing a language arts curriculum while reading a Newbery book. I like the fact that it includes both lapbooking components and corresponding notebooking pages – you get to pick what best fits your children!
I would highly recommend this resource, especially for 2nd grade and above, as it requires skills in writing sentences, character analysis, research, and dictionary usage, and it also includes a book report as the final task to complete. Also – the book itself has some deep emotional content, so you may want to be sure your child is mature enough to handle the emotional aspect of it.
As part of this study, we researched interesting facts about sea otters, dolphins, sea elephants, island foxes, seals, seagulls, cormorants, and octopi. We talked about what it would be like to live alone on an island and what type of survival skills would be needed. Because this book is historical fiction, we also used it as an opportunity to compare historical and fictional accounts of real events. For our lapbook, we balanced out some of the more difficult lapbooking components from Notebooking Nook’s resource with others we found on-line at to come up with our final product.
The NPS has compiled chapter summaries and interactive activities to use while reading this book. Scholastic’s Reading Guide included comprehension questions, author bio, plot/character/setting/themes, ideas for activities and other useful information, so we were able to make this our complete Language Arts curriculum for about six weeks. Really, there are many free resources for studying this book – the problem is narrowing it down to something you can use!
Overall, Stephen says he liked this book, “especially the way that Karana became friends with the animals, but it sure does have a lot of death in it.” We had some deep discussions about courage, responsibility, death and forgiveness as a result of reading this book. And now that we are finished with this book, we are planning to take a trip to the Chattanooga Aquarium to celebrate!
Though we’re glad to have studied Island of the Blue Dolphins, it’s now time to move on to a lighter Language Arts study, also about island life: Nim’s Island by Wendy Orr. After reading the author bio, Stephen decided it’s just really cool that Wendy Orr wrote her first draft of Nim’s Island at age nine. It will be interesting to do a comparison between the two books when we are finished. And we’ve never seen the movie, so we haven’t even spoiled the ending!