Owl Babies by Martin Wadell                     KS1

Three baby owls, Sarah, Percy and Bill, wake up one night in their hole in a tree to find that their mother has gone. So they sit on a branch and wait. Darkness gathers and the owls grow anxious, wondering when their mother will return.

Teaching Ideas from Literacy Shed Facebook friends.

Claire Hardy: We do lost posters and ordering of the story. We also rewrite the story with different endings.

Mary Robinson: The children made their own Owl babies story sack. We got some fluffy baby owlet puppets from a local wildlife park and the children made homes for their owl babies, board games light and dark fact sheets owl lift the flap fact files.

Sarah Carpenter: The children have written letters to the owlets to tell them about their own fears and reassure them that they have no reason to be worried and why.

Tuesday by David Wiesner

This is a great book/animation that can be used in any primary year group from YR - Y6!

All of the following activities could be used when looking at both the book and animation.

  • As with many of the films on here allow children to recall key events either drawing a story board or creating a bare bones of the story list.
  • Hot seating characters and recording thoughts about what they have seen.
  • Write some inside/outside thoughts for the characters.  What would they say if they had seen the frogs?  What would they be thinking?  e.g. The man eating his sandwich may say - 'Don't be stupid there are no such things as flying frogs! (Although I could have sworn I saw something.) See @alanpeat sentence types.
  • Write a newspaper report for the events either in newspaper style or as an outside broadcast, children could act out the latter in groups - interviewing key witnesses etc.
  • Write a sequel using different animals - the book lends itself to pigs.
Introducing the text - why not have lily pads lay around the classroom and wet patches on tables in the morning. Staff in other classes could be primed to answer questions from pupils about anything suspicious they have seen that morning.  Pupil detectives could write questions and be sent to other classes to find out.  Teacher responses could be that they left school last night at 6 and there were none there then and they were in at 6 am so can they work out what time the lily pads arrived?  They could say that they couldn't be sure as it was getting dark but there seemed to be dark objects flying across the playground etc