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.