My children and I recently read The Twenty-One Balloons and we just loved this whimsical adventure tale! Alongside this imaginative, creative tale, we studied geography, hot air balloons, volcanoes, and more as we worked our way through this story.

This blog post includes everything you need to know about The Twenty-One Balloons Book Study and how you can cultivate rich learning through literature as you read this story in your home.

In this blog post:

The Twenty-One Balloons summary
Themes in The Twenty-One Balloons
The Twenty-One Balloons book study ideas and activities
How we use Treehouse Book Club in our homeschool
Treehouse Book Club community photos

The Twenty-One Balloons summary

The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène du Bois is a fantasy-adventure novel filled with inventions, travel, and undiscovered civilizations. When Professor William Waterman Sherman is spotted from a ship at sea, clutching a wooden raft floating in the Atlantic Ocean, the reader is thrust into the fantastical tale. The retired professor explains how his journey started with plans to ride a hot air balloon across the Pacific Ocean, but when his balloon crashes on an undiscovered volcanic island, he encounters a civilization with new government, cultures, styles, and more. The Twenty-One Balloons is the winner of the 1948 Newbery Medal and is beloved for Pène du Bois’ rich imagination, creativity, and more.

The Twenty-One Balloons Book Study is available now. This book is a perfect story for creative children who love imaginative, whimsical adventure stories.

Themes in The Twenty-One Balloons

There are so many opportunities for learning as you read The Twenty-One Balloons including history, science, geography, and more. Some of the themes in the story are:

World and US Geography
Longitude and latitude
Chester Arthur, the 21st President of the United States
History of hot air balloons
How balloons are made
Landforms
Anatomy of a volcano
1883 Volcanic Eruption of Krakatoa
Minerals and diamonds
Famous architecture
Hurricanes
Inventions
Cultures and cuisines from around the world

The Twenty-One Balloons book study ideas and activities

We read The Twenty-One Balloons with the coordinating book study, including a four-week reading schedule, discussion questions, notebooking prompts, and activities.

The Twenty-One Balloons Book Study Guide includes fun activities for kids and homeschool groups like making balloon animals, modeling the fantasy island of Krakatoa with salt dough, making a restaurant menu with international food, and more.

We loved learning all about balloons, like the inventor of hot air balloons, why hot air balloons have sandbags, and how balloons are made. We loved learning about other topics like hurricanes, volcanos, and diamonds.

My kids loved making these lap books as I read aloud to them.

How we use Treehouse Book Club in our homeschool

We originally read The Twenty-One Balloons as a part of Treehouse Book Club. Treehouse Book Club is a monthly book club membership designed for families with children ages 6-12. I designed Treehouse Book Club as a way to dive deep into living literature in your homeschool connecting themes to science, nature, geography, history, and language arts. The book club guides include a reading schedule, activity ideas, discussion questions, writing prompts, and more, and are designed to join with an online or in-person community.

In my family, we read the Treehouse Book Club selection together over lunch and use this as a jumping off point to explore literature together, along with themes in history and science.

I love that we can use the reading plan and Book Club Guide from Treehouse Book Club as a way to blend literature with other subjects my children are studying. I created it to be an organic way to read high-quality literature and explore new topics like geography, historical figures, vocabulary, and more in an organic way.

After finishing the book, we meet with a group of friends who have also read the book to celebrate finishing the novel, give presentations, eat snacks related to the story, and more. I love that we have a template to engage and share in learning with our friends and family. We benefit so much from collaborating and learning with one another!