Michael Morpurgo Month 2020: The Butterfly Lion Cover Sheet

The Butterfly Lion 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 experiments with the use of verbs for evocative description.

The Butterfly Lion “All my life I’ll think of you, I promise I will. I won’t ever forget you.”

Michael escapes from his strict boarding school and meets an old lady who lives nearby. She tells a remarkable story about a boy called Bertie, who rescued an orphaned white lion cub from the African veld. They are inseparable until Bertie is sent to boarding school far away in England and the lion is sold to a circus. Bertie swears that one day they will see one another again, but it is the butterfly lion that ensures their friendship will never be forgotten.

Themes and ideas The Butterfly Lion is a perennial favourite in many primary classroom – a book that introduces children to new ideas and another part of the world, while also raising familiar themes. These themes open up great opportunities to explore big ideas with a class of children: Separation In the book, Michael finds himself at a strict boarding school, separated from his family and his old familiar life. He runs away and soon finds himself listening to another tale of separation, that of Bertie and his lion.

Key discussion questions: • In what ways are Michael and Bertie’s situations in The Butterfly Lion similar?

• In what ways are they different?

• What advice would you offer to the two characters in the story when they are feeling upset?

Friendship The relationship between Bertie and the white lion sits at the heart of the story.

When Bertie learns that the lion cub is to be sold to a French circus, he tries to release the lion into the wild. In order to save his friend, Bertie is prepared to never see him again.

Key discussion questions: • How do you think Bertie feels when he decides to release the lion into the wild, knowing that he will probably never see him again?

• What would you do in Bertie’s situation?

Of course, other themes and ideas might emerge from reading and discussing the book: conservation, life in the wild versus life in captivity, memory and remembering, as well as the chance to learn about a different part of the world for many children.

Using the resource This resource shares an extract from the story, a description of a waterhole in South Africa. After reading the text, there is a set of short teaching activities considering author’s craft and the use of verbs for evocative description.

There is also a sheet with a storytelling challenge based on the extract. For The Butterfly Lion it focuses on using precisely chosen verbs to create an evocative description of a scene. 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 the book corner, school library, local library or a bookshop.

Illustrations © Christian Birmingham, 1996

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. 23, so read up until this point first. If you are using the resources as an introduction to the text, then tell children that you are going to look at an extract that describes a waterhole in Timbavati in South Africa.

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 children to list what Bertie can see from behind the compound fence. (If any of the animals are unfamiliar, you could find a picture or film clip online.)

Ask the children to work in pairs to reread the text and find as many adjectives as they can.

Then share the next slide.

Slide 4 Share children’s ideas. If they have not spotted “dusty”, draw their attention to this adjective.

Ask the children: • Why might Michael Morpurgo have chosen to describe the compound Bertie lives in as “dusty”?

Slide 5 Share children’s ideas. If relevant, draw out the difference between verbs of being (was, became) and verbs which capture an action or movement (highlighted in bold). Ask children what they notice about these words compared to the number of adjectives (there are lots more).

Explain to children that although adjectives are sometimes referred to as “describing words”, all words can help with description.

In this case, it is well-chosen, precise verbs that provide the description, letting the reader picture the scene.

Draw their attention to the word “gripping” – what does this tell them about how Bertie is feeling?

Slide 6 Tell the children they are going to practise using verbs to describe a scene in their own storytelling, just as Michael Morpurgo does in The Butterfly Lion.

Ask the children to imagine a place. It might be one they have invented or a place that they know well.

• How might this contrast with the waterhole?

In pairs, children can describe what they can see to each other, trying to use verbs (bustled, crashing, chattering) rather than adjectives (loud, busy, noisy).

Encourage children to think about the difference between the two places beyond the literal (inside is dry and dusty, and outside has water), and to think that “dusty” can also mean boring – another comparison between life in the compound and the excitement of the waterhole.

They can then try writing descriptions of their scenes and sharing these with other people in the class. After they have written their descriptions, ask the children to reflect on their use of the verbs for description: how do their choices affect how the scenes sound when read aloud?

Next, draw their attention to the fact that there are very few adjectives (dusty, alert spread-legged) in this piece of descriptive writing. Now, ask the children to work in pairs again to find as many verbs as they can.

While they might want to be quick and excited, will it always be easy for their audience to follow what they are saying if they talk very quickly or write in very long sentences? How might they get around these challenges?