Charlie Cook's Favourite Book: 1

Product Information

The book itself includes an extended range of verbs in the past tense such as ‘curled up’, ‘read’, ‘found’, ‘cried’, ‘went’, ‘told’, ‘shook’, ‘jumped’, ‘built’, ‘chose’, ‘saw’, ‘waved’, ‘stole’, ‘caught’… This is just a selection. Or a pirate and ship for Shiver me Timbers or My First Encyclopedia with a series of objects labelled with the first letter. They could then make up their own titles – you could allocate one book to one group if time is an issue, if not it could be interesting to compare the different titles the groups come up with.

You could always suggest it to your school as they may have only considered the use of text books and may be open to the use of real storybooks in class. You could find out what sort of book they want to talk about and arrange the groups so that you have a selection of book types. Make sure before you begin to read that the seating is such that all the children can actually see the illustrations. The best part about this book is that each character in their individual stories is reading a book, so in essence one character is reading about the next until we eventually work our way back to Charlie. You could provide them with a few key words such as ‘ghosts’, ‘country’, ‘encyclopedia’, ‘fairy tales’ and ‘thieves’.

They could draw their own picture from the book they find the most interesting from Charlie’s collection.

If you don’t have the luxury of moving tables, chairs or even children then have at least the ritual of clearing desks and so creating a change in the pace of the lesson. The front cover of the book, illustrated by Axel Scheffler, shows Charlie sitting, reading a book whilst surrounded by the characters in his favourite books.You could select a few from throughout the book and get the class to tell you which story they hear the verb in. They can listen again and see if they find any other words which rhyme with their word bank they had previously compiled.