This Morning I Met a Whale

Product Information

Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth This is a magical story that spans many decades. The Butterfly Lion provides a motivating and memorable way of teaching children to control shifts in time in their own writing. Listen to the story and think about how the author moves from one period to another. This is a beautifully constructed story-within-a-story. When a boy awakens after being stranded on a sandbank, he finds himself confronted by the legendary King Arthur himself. The King then proceeds to tell his story. I thought the best thing I could do was to just keep talking. I couldn’t think what else to do. For a moment or two I didn’t know what else to say, and anyway I suddenly felt a bit stupid talking to him…” Each worksheet features a variety of writing, comprehension and research activities for pupils to carry out. These include writing a timeline of Joan of Arc’s life and describing how you met your best friend.

James Clements, education writer and former primary teacher, shares ideas for celebrating the master storyteller this February… urn:lcp:thismorningimetw0000morp:epub:7735c612-7161-4589-9c7d-53238d34034c Foldoutcount 0 Identifier thismorningimetw0000morp Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9n38qc6r Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781406306460 A boy takes a regular walk down to the Thames - and one morning he sees a whale in the river. To his immense surprise, the whale starts to speak to him. In my first year teaching, I adopted the same approach with Kensuke’s Kingdom, my class howling when we had to stop each day at home time. This was a fiction book and my favourite character is the whale because he risks his life to tell an important message to help other whales.This resource features three printable worksheets for three Morpurgo books: Sparrow: The True Story of Joan of Arc, Alone on a Wide Wide Sea and A Medal for Leroy. The suggested books and classroom activities below are perfect if you want to take part in Michael Morpurgo Month. Or use them to enjoy the richness of his stories at any time of the year. The natural world Kensuke’s Kingdom

Pupils could try to write their own story-within-a-story, based on another myth or legend they know. Pinocchio by Pinocchio This year, the theme is horses. This is to celebrate 40 years of the Morpurgo’s modern classic, War Horse. Use this month to introduce pupils to this beautiful tale. Michael Morpurgo Month takes place every February. What’s the theme for Michael Morpurgo Month 2023? Wow. This is a really beautiful, touching, and sad book that really gets you thinking. It was beautifully written and the story was amazing. It has a really good moral, also. I loved reading this.The National Literacy Trust is a registered charity no. 1116260 and a company limited by guarantee no. 5836486 registered in England and Wales and a registered charity in Scotland no. SC042944. This resource uses the moving and relevant environmental message of This Morning I Met a Whale by Michael Morpurgo to put oracy at the heart of transition: prompting high-quality discussion, developing skills such as questioning, clarifying and summarising, and building confidence in verbal presentation. In this free PDF there are loads of ideas and writing opportunities. These range from environmental information pamphlets and persuasive letters to news reports. Let there be half an hour of storytime at the end of the day in primary schools up and down the country. Make this the half hour they all long for, that they don’t want to be over. Let the children go home dreaming of the story, reliving it, wondering.”

Ideas include writing a persuasive letter from the main character’s perspective in boarding school, a survival guide for lions and a plot outline for the novel. This text can provide a great model for first-person writing. Children can invent new adventures for Pinocchio or retell another familiar story with themselves in the role of the protagonist. Times of war Friend or Foe As a child, I remember listening with baited breath as our headteacher read Friend or Foealoud in assembly. He was sure to always stop on a cliffhanger so we’d have to wait a whole week to find out what happened next. Helped by his new friends, Omar becomes Son of Gulliver – a role that requires him to develop peacemaking abilities.This BBC radio play of the story is free to listen to, which makes this a valuable text for comparing play scripts and prose, and how the same story can be told in different ways. Asking pupils to think about some of the words that younger children might find challenging and then writing a glossary to help them understand the book will help them reflect on their own comprehension and to practise communicating the meaning of words. When war comes to Omar’s Afghan village, 10-year-old Omar and his mother set off on a long and dangerous journey. They’re heading for England and Uncle Said’s café. Use Morpurgo’s tale of a boy who spies a bottlenose whale in the Thames as the centrepiece of your next Key Stage 2 storybook curriculum.