Alien Invasion

Alien Invasion

Mike Brownlow and Nathan Green

Alien Invasion is a fantasy story about a boy who likes looking at the sky and aliens that are preparing to invade Earth. The story builds excitement and tension as the reader wonders what will happen when the aliens invade.

The story is available as an Ebook on the Oxford Owl website, with optional narration.

The story has good pictures, and uses descriptive language to tell the reader about the world the aliens come from, and describing the aliens themselves. This would link nicely for children to develop their descriptive vocabulary and for them to come up with their own descriptive sentences about the settings and characters.

I will be using this story in a fantasy story topic for the children to explore settings and how they can be described. The story links well with the planning and their are activities available with the Ebook that would suit as a task as well.

I think the story lends itself well to prediction tasks as well, where children could imagine what would happen when the aliens invade, as well as some hot seating tasks with the children pretending to be the aliens.

Pirate Adventure

Pirate Adventure

Roderick Hunt and Alex Brychta

Pirate Adventure is an exciting fantasy story. The story is from the Oxford Reading Tree and is one of the Magic Key stories and so includes characters that most children would know.

The story is available as an Ebook on the Oxford Owl website and can be easily shared with the children, as well as having a couple of comprehension activity games to play alongside. 

In the story there is excitement and adventure, and would give good opportunity to guess what would happen next. I am using the book within a fantasy stories topic for year 1, the first week of which is concentrating on settings of fantasy books. Within this week, the children will be thinking of describing settings, some of which will be chosen from this book. The children will also be predicting what will be happening in the book and creating their own ending, this would work well with this story, finding out what happens when the characters meet the pirates.

This is a well written story, with good examples of punctuation which could be taught to the children. It also has areas of excitement and tension and so children could experiment with expression when reading the story for themselves.

We're going on a bear hunt

We're going on a bear hunt

Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury

We're going on a bear hunt is a beautiful picture book. It has repetitive lines and good words for sounds which would be nice for children to practise their phonics.
I used this story to read to a year 1 class at the end of the day, it builds excitement and tension and allows for good use of expression. The children loved the story and became very excited, joining in with the sound effects.

This story would be good for individual reading with children, it can give them an opportunity to explore using expression for themselves, seeing if they can have a scared voice, or an excited voice. As well as this the repetitive pattern to the story would help the reader once they get into the swing of the book.

As mentioned before the book has beautiful images in it, and could be used to explore comprehension and possibly used for a task predicting the story; if you share a page with the children, can they predict or create their own text for it.

The children really enjoyed this book, they loved looking at the pictures and enjoyed joining in with the sounds as the family are trying to find a bear.

Beware Beware

Beware Beware

Susan Hill

Illustrated by Angela Barrett

Beware Beware is a lovely picture book telling the story of a little, adventurous girl who wanders too far and gets lost in the woods.

I used the book as a story to run alongside Giant's Necklace, using it as differentiation for two statemented year 6 girls. The language within the story would be challenging for very low ability but most of the words can be sounded out using phonic knowledge so can be decoded. The words are also often repeated and patterns start to emerge which would help the reader. The text seems to be quite poetic and allows a rhythm to be set when reading the story.

The characters and language used also helped the girls to discuss ideas of emotive language and we were able to get them to explore hot seating, as the rest of the class were doing for Giant's Necklace.

The pictures within the book are beautiful and lend themselves well for discussing personification, similes and metaphors and they visually show the descriptions that could be written.

There is also a couple of different page layouts, with smaller pages, which add a bit more interest to the look of the book and help tell the story.

The girls who read the story thoroughly enjoyed it, they liked to find different pictures within each page and found a lovely descriptive page which became their favourite.

Giant's Necklace

Giant's Necklace

Michael Morpurgo

Giant's Necklace is a short story from Morpurgo's book Hereabout Hill. The story follows the adventures, or struggles, of a girl on her last day of holiday. It is a lovely story, short but not too short. I was able to use it within my year 6 placement class as a kickstart to a story writing topic. We spent a week teaching from Giant's Necklace as there are lots of different avenues you can cover with the story. It gives plenty of opportunities to explore inference and deduction as you read between the lines to guess the twist at the end, but most can only be spotted once you have read that ending. 

We were also able to use it to explore a range of descriptive language, such as personification, similes, metaphors and emotive language. As well as this, it gave some great opportunities for creative writing and idea forming, asking the children to discuss and think of what the story might be about from the title, and then from the break in the middle of the story.

Once we reached the ending of the story it was also good to explore some role playing and hot seating to discuss how each character is feeling.

The children really enjoyed the story, always wanting to hear more when we stopped at each cliff hanger.

 

Although short, there is plenty within the story to create a good amount of work and give you enough input to make you feel for the characters.

Overall, a great story with a gripping and shocking ending. The story is truly moving and a great one to work through with children.

Macbeth: A Shakespeare story

Macbeth: A Shakespeare Story

Andrew Matthews 

Illustrations: Tony Ross

As the title suggests, this book is the story of Macbeth. It has been shortened and written in modern language so it is easy for children to read. It also has lots of illustrations all the way through so it breaks up the pages from just text.

The story has kept all the main aspects of Shakespeare’s original story, however it has removed some aspects so the story is less complicated and shorter. Although the language has been changed, at the beginning and the end of the book there are short quotes from the original play so as to demonstrate the original language.

The story has been split up, not through chapters, but through page breaks, which would provide good stopping points for children. These occur with a change in scene so there is a definite change for children to understand.

At the back of the book there is some information given about the inspiration for Macbeth, about Shakespeare himself and the Globe theatre.

The start of the book includes a cast list page, similar to what would be given in the play version, as well as a short contents page, which children could explore.

I used this book myself to provide a quick reminder to the story of Macbeth when my class came to study the story. I found it quick and concise in the story and did help provide a reminder. I also think it could be used as an introduction to historical stories for children to be inspired by.

Matthews, A. (2003) Macbeth: A Shakespeare Story. London: Orchard Books.

I've seen Santa

I’ve seen Santa

David Bedford

Illustrated by Tim Warnes

This is a beautiful book for young children. It tells a lovely story of Little Bear wanting to stay up on Christmas Eve to see Santa as he delivers his presents.

Each page of the book is full of detail in the drawings and the font is of a good size so younger readers could follow along, or try to read themselves if they wanted.

I think the story would be suitable for a wide range of ages and the pictures would provide lovely visuals for very young children.

The text includes some interesting phonic language, which could challenge younger readers, and enforce some of their sounds, especially with lots of use of consonant digraphs: “ch”, “sh”, “wh”.

The story shows a lovely aspect of family life and demonstrates the excitement and mystery that Christmas holds.

Bedford, D. (2005) I’ve seen Santa. London: Little Tiger Press. 

How to handle your school

How to handle your school

Roy Apps

Illustrated by Jo Moore

I think this book is a great read for those children who find it difficult to enjoy reading and maybe even struggle with school. The book is presented as an ongoing investigation into how good/bad your school is and includes many hints, tips and jokes for children to enjoy. Throughout the books there are various quizzes for the reader to participate in, with a score card at the back so you can keep track of how you and your school are measuring up.

It is an easy read, with lots of repetition but also several puns, which help demonstrate children’s comprehension.

I used this book to initially engage my reading buddy into reading with me. He enjoyed the jokes and illustrations, although I did have to promise not to share some of his answers with my CTM.  I was able to assess his reading and comprehension level nicely through this book and he did enjoy completing the quizzes.

Within this book there is a contents page and footnotes on various pages, which also allow you to assess your readers knowledge of how books work.

This book is part of a series, this one giving an overview of handling school, but others helping you to handle your teacher or school bully.

Apps, R. (2005) How to handle your school. London: Scholastic Children’s Books.

Dust 'n' Bones

Dust ‘n’ Bones: Ten Ghost Stories

Chris Mould

As the title suggests, this book is a collection of ten ghost stories; a mixture of ones written by Chris Mould and traditional stories that the author has adapted.

The stories are of varying length, allowing some to be slightly longer reads than others.

I used this book to aid with a ghost story writing topic in year six. Although the writing is of a lower reading level than the children were at, there are a lot of good language techniques that could be picked out to demonstrate different writing styles. These include emotive language, good description, figurative language and techniques for building suspense. One short story that I particularly enjoyed was “A Bedtime Tale” by Chris Mould himself. This story was very short, only four pages long, and is very good for demonstrating how you can build suspense in a story and how you can describe a ghost. I read this story aloud to the children as part of a starter to a lesson on describing their own ghosts. The story inspired some brilliant descriptions.

The other stories through this book are just as good. The adaptations show how you can share traditional stories with children, and although they are scary they are not too scary for younger children too.

There are illustrations throughout the books, which add a great deal to the stories. The pages themselves look as though they are worn and old, as if the pages are old and damaged. The text is well presented, with occasional bold words to add further detail and emphasis.

The book has previously won “Year three/four book of the month” on a children’s book review website and I do think the content is suitable for this age range, as well as the reading level.

Mould, C. (2008) Dust ‘n’ Bones: Ten Ghost Stories. London: Hodder Children’s Books.

Choose your superhero

Choose Your Superhero

Norman Silver

Illustrations: Russell Ayto

This book is a compilation of poetry written by Norman Silver. The poems are all individual and do not seem to follow a set theme, length or style. It is a good, quick read, I would suggest it is good for children who might be put off by larger books with long chapters as it is easy to stop whenever you want.

Each poem is about a different topic, all are meant as a light read, but some touch on issues that children could be facing; such as getting along with a new step-parent, dealing with a bully, traveller children and special needs children. The poems promote healthy relationships, but also have the imaginative edge that child fiction has.

There are a few illustrations throughout the book, which aid visualising the poetry and the stories being told.

There is one poem, Day of Doom, which is split up into four parts throughout the book. This keeps the interest through the book, as you want to see how the poem continues. However it also gives you the page number of where it continues so, if you wish to, you could read the poem from start to finish without gaps.

As each poem is different there does not seem to be a logical flow to the poems, however the author has put some key poems in specific places. For example, a poem titled “And Now for Something Completely Different” is about a quarter of the way through, to provide a break. Also, there is a poem called “Intermission” which is situated in the middle of the poem.

The book itself has features that could provide interesting to explore with children, including a contents page, a tag line on the front cover and a blurb on the back.

The language of the poems would be aimed at a higher level of reader with some made up words in some but with a good understanding of phonics the made up words could be deciphered with ease.

Silver, N. (1998) Choose your Superhero. London: Hodder Children’s Books.

PGCE Children's Literature

I am currently studying for a PGCE in Primary teaching, and as part of my course I have taken an additional option of a topic on Children's Literature. Part of this is to read and write book reviews about various children's books and then share my thoughts. I thought an easy way to do this would be through a blog.

I hope you enjoy!