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.