A child marked for death by an ancient league of assassins escapes into an abandoned graveyard, where he is reared and protected by its spirit denizens. This helps keep the pace of reading up and maintains the children’s interest. A delicious mix of murder, fantasy, humor and human longing, the tale of Nobody Owens is told in magical, haunting prose. I have included a slide for each lesson that clearly states which pages should be read before the next lesson.
As it follows the life of a boy raised by the dead, the story manages to provide powerful messages for its living readers. Please be aware that the 20 lessons focus in on certain points in the book and some of the reading of the book would need to be read outside of the lesson time. Neil Gaiman’s Gothic fantasy The Graveyard Book is a unique and compelling adventure. I use a green, yellow, red chilli system, where children start on either green or yellow and then can move on to the more challenging red chilli. Some of the tasks include differentiation. Learning objectives include: predicting, summarising, retrieving information, inference, finding evidence to justify an answer as well as reading fluently with expression and intonation. I found that this reduces the need for lots paper handouts and makes the lessons run even more smoothly. All tasks are set on the powerpoint for children to view and work from - there is only one worksheet included. All are set in the context of The Graveyard Book and children really enjoy the short tasks.
Many tasks in the lessons expose children to similar questions that they might come across in the Reading SATS test. Its like the people who believe theyll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesnt work that way.
#The graveyard book series
The series of lessons is appropriate for Year 4 to Year 6 children but can easily be adapted.Īll lessons are linked to the English Reading National Curriculum and all focus on the content domains from the reading SATS papers. Youre always you, and that dont change, and youre always changing, and theres nothing you can do about it. Note: To maintain variety, slides sometimes slightly differ from this format. The sensation at the conclusion of this book it to get out and go do something. It is about right and wrong, morality and injustice, and about making the most of the time we have. Task slide - a range of activities including the following: annotated drawings, themed comprehension questions, debates and challenges. For all the death, ghouls, ghosts, and headstones in The Graveyard Book, this is chiefly a tale of living. Read the book with the class - all page numbers provided (I like to use a mixture of Teacher reading, partner reading, choral reading, and echo reading) Pre-teach vocabulary that will come up in the reading Starter/ opening task on mini whiteboards My slides will guide you from start to finish through this wonderfully engaging book that the children will love! The slides are intended to be taught to the whole class using the increasingly popular whole class reading approach.Įach lesson usually takes the similar format: This resource contains 10 Powerpoints (or Google Slides) each comprising of 2 lessons.
Ages 10 up.A series of 20 ready-to-teach complete Powerpoint or Google Slides lessons about the award winning book The Graveyard Book. When the chilling moments do come, they are as genuinely frightening as only Gaiman can make them, and redeem any shortcomings. He’s already murdered the resident couple and their daughter all that’s left is to murder their toddler son. As the boy, called Nobody or Bod, grows up, the killer still stalking him, there are slack moments and some repetition not enough to spoil a reader's pleasure, but noticeable all the same. The Graveyard Book Summary Next Chapter 1 In a small English village, a frightening-looking man named Jack prowls through a house. What mystery/horror/suspense reader could stop here, especially with Gaiman's talent for storytelling? The author riffs on the Jungle Book, folklore, nursery rhymes and history he tosses in werewolves and hints at vampires and he makes these figures seem like metaphors for transitions in childhood and youth. The opening is enthralling: "There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife." Evading the murderer who kills the rest of his family, a child roughly 18 months old climbs out of his crib, bumps his bottom down a steep stairway, walks out the open door and crosses the street into the cemetery opposite, where ghosts take him in. A lavish middle-grade novel, Gaiman's first since Coraline, this gothic fantasy almost lives up to its extravagant advance billing.