Load the What can it be song. Review body parts of people and animals and do the pre-song matching activity together. Play Simon Says (e.g. Simon Says touch your head, flap your wings, etc).
Listen and watch the song. Give Ss page 1 of the activity sheet and they complete. Listen again to check.
Play the song and the Ss sing along, with their activity sheets to help them if necessary.
Ss work in pairs and quiz each other, using the activity sheet, e.g. What has a minotaur got? or It's got a man's body and a bull's head - what is it?
Ss design and write about their own creature on page 2 of the activity sheet.
Ss add more verses to the song, based on the creatures they designed in the previous stage. Then sing the song again with the new verses!
Inua Ellam's poem, Candy Coated Unicorns And Converse All Stars, is a dark look at the plight of individuals set against violence, both of a domestic and of a general nature.
This extract from Andrew O’Hagan’s novel, Be Near Me, is centred around a boat trip that the narrator – a priest – is taking with two of his young parishioners.
Francesca Beard's poem, Baby Scorpion, deals with transformation and consequence. A baby scorpion crawls from a burning log in front of a couple who are keeping warm by the fire.
This extract is taken from Keith Gray's novel, The Chain. The extract deals with a young girl who gets engrossed in reading from a book to her father, who is dying in hospital.
