This is a literature study,on “Tamburlaine’s Elephants” by Geraldine McCaughrean, put together in the form of a lapbook. I did this project with my nine year olds.
Quite a lot of this project was done on the computer, in order to give practice in word processing, inserting images etc. You will see that they enjoyed playing around with fonts!
The novel is a historical fiction, so we looked at some of the historical background as well as the story elements.
The historical background section was divided into two parts, biography of Timur I Lang and brief section on the historical use of elephants in warfare. For these sections the boys read online, made notes and wrote up their paragraphs.
I found the following links useful:
Battle of al-Qadisiyyah (Where the Muslim army, led by Sa’d bin Abi Waqas (ra), defeated a Persian (Sassanid) army which included an elephant corps.)
Next we included a book report. I based this piece of writing around the guidelines found here.
We wrote sections on
Questions of identity
The importance of Chess (Timur had “his own” version of chess, learn more here, try it here)
Comparing the main characters, Rusti and Kavi
We also made a table to compare the historical details in the book with those we found in the history. This was to both distinguish between the history and the fiction and to show how the two can be interwoven.
On the back are lists of sights, sounds, tastes, textures and smells described in various parts of the story. Of course we couldn’t list everything mentioned in such a descriptive book, but the lists offer a snapshot.
For more details on what we wrote about in this project I have added some brief study notes below.
Always Learning Resources 
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