Alone on a Wide Wide Sea This is one of sixteen resources that you can use with your class to celebrate Michael Morpurgo Month in February, or to explore books from the world famous author at any other time of the year. Each resource is built around an extract but also shares some of the key themes from the complete story that make the book such a rich and enjoyable text to share with your class. The extracts can be read with the class using the accompanying PowerPoints, and there are teacher notes and pupil challenges to help children develop their own story-writing skills. This activity looks at how the author adapts language for the needs of different audiences.
Alone on a Wide Wide Sea “There were dozens of us on the ship, boys and girls. We were off to Australia, but it might as well have been to the moon.� Orphaned in WWII, Arthur is separated from his sister and sent to the other side of the world. There his extraordinary journey continues as he and his friend Marty survive brutal captivity on a working farm, find a new family with the eccentric Aunty Meg and her animals, and discover their talent for designing yachts. Sixty years later, Arthur’s daughter Allie sets sail single-handed in a yacht designed by her father, determined to find his long lost sister in England.
Themes and ideas Alone on a Wide Wide Sea is a beautifully rich and interestingly structured book to share in the primary classroom. When reading the whole text, there are a number of themes and ideas to explore with children, including:
Symbols of hope For different characters in the book, objects become representations of hope (for example, the lucky key to Arthur, or the albatross that follows Allie in Kitty 4). Key discussion questions: • Why is the key so important to Arthur in his story? What is its significance at the end of the story? • What might the albatross represent to Allie as she makes her journey alone? • Is there a similarity in how the characters see these two things? Family relationships The relationships between different family members sit at the heart of Alone on a Wide Wide Sea: Arthur and Kitty; Arthur and Allie; and even Arthur and Marty. Key discussion questions: • Which do you think are the strongest links between different characters in the book? • How do these links survive distance: both physical distance and distance over time?
Using the resource This resource shares three short extracts from the story, where Allie describes the waves in the Southern Ocean. After reading the text, there is a set of short teaching activities considering the author’s craft and the way language choices can be adapted for different purposes and audiences. There is also a sheet with a storytelling challenge based on the extract. For Alone on a Wide Wide Sea it focuses on adapting language for the needs of different audiences. This could be used as a short classroom activity or as homework to consolidate the learning from the teaching session. After reading and discussing the extract, hopefully some children will be inspired to read the book itself. You could read it aloud as a class novel or direct children to where they can find a copy to read themselves: the book corner, school library, local library or bookshop.
Illustrations © Tim Stevens, 2006
Teacher’s notes for the PowerPoint Slide 2 Share the front cover and blurb to introduce the book. If you are reading the whole novel as a class, the activities in this resource begin on p. 248, so read up until this point first. If you are using the resources as an introduction to the text, then tell children you are going to look at two extracts from the story where Allie describes the waves in the Southern Ocean, near Cape Horn. Slide 3 Read aloud together (either with the teacher reading aloud and children following, children reading together as a class or children reading together in pairs) and then ask the children to identify any unfamiliar words and phrases (“south of 60°”; “Cape Horn and the Antarctic peninsular”; “ocean swells”; “uninterrupted”). Explain the meaning of these terms, using maps or photographs online if necessary. Now they understand the language, ask the children to summarise what information Allie is sharing about the waves (that they are very big and the sea is very rough!). Slide 4 Read aloud again (either with the teacher reading aloud and children following, children reading together as a class or children reading together in pairs) and then ask children if this information adds to what they knew already or contradicts it. Ask them what the effect of the sea was on Allie (she couldn’t sleep and she worried a lot). Explain to the children that Allie’s part of Alone on a Wide Wide Sea is told in two ways: as a first person narrative where she talks directly to the reader and through her emails to her family at home. Ask the children from which mode of writing the extract is taken (the narrative). Explain to the children that although this is written in Allie’s voice, it still uses Michael Morpurgo’s storyteller voice too, with repetition of key phrases (“in seas like this”, “in weather like this”); evocative verbs (“screamed”,
“pounding”); personification (the boat as “she”, “complaining”). Ask the children whether they would expect the same type of language in Allie’s emails to her family, or do they think they might be different? If so, how? Slide 5 Read the next section aloud together, explaining this is a description of the same waves, but written as an email to her family. Ask the children to work with a partner to find ways that this text is different, e.g. the chatty/ colloquial/familiar tone (“aren’t they nice?”); talking directly to them (“I promise you”, “so I’ll stop”); the list of adjectives; phrases like “wave monsters”. Then look at ways that this text is the same, e.g. some poetic phrases (“raging white water all around”, “the air snowing foam”); similes (“like an avalanche”). Draw out from discussion that part of being a good storyteller is being able to adapt the language you use to your audience. Ask the children how they might change the way they tell a story if they were telling it to a very small child, a newspaper reporter, their best friend or a judge in a courtroom. Slide 6 Tell the children that they are going to practise telling the same simple story to different audiences, following the instructions above. Once they have tried several times, stop the class and ask them to reflect on the sorts of things they might change (how formal the language they use is; how complicated the vocabulary they can use is; whether they can use slang terms or not, etc). They can now choose a specific audience and try writing their story down, thinking carefully about who they are writing for and tailoring their language accordingly.