Flamingo Boy 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 Michael Morpurgo uses sentence structure and syntax to create excitement and a varied rhythm in his descriptive writing.
Flamingo Boy A young autistic boy lives on his parents’ farm among the salt flats of the Camargue in the south of France, an area populated by flamingos. There are lots of things he doesn’t understand: but he does know how to heal animals. Every week he goes to market with his mother, to ride his special horse on the town carousel. But then the Germans come; a soldier shoots a flamingo from the sky. The carousel is damaged, the horses broken. For this vulnerable boy, everything is falling apart. Only there’s a kind sergeant among the Germans – a man with a young boy of his own at home, a man who trained as a carpenter. Between them, perhaps boy and man can mend what has been broken – and maybe even the whole town…
Themes and ideas Flamingo Boy is a wonderfully rich text to explore with a Key Stage 2 class. The themes that might come from sharing the text are:
Acceptance and friendship At the heart of the story is the relationship between Kezia, who is from a Roma background, and Lorenzo, an autistic boy. They become friends and form a bond that lasts throughout their lives. Key discussion questions: • Looking back over the story, why do Lorenzo and Kezia become friends? In different circumstances, do you think they would have become so close? Complex characters The characters in Flamingo Boy are multilayered, far more than simple cutouts. The Caporal in the story decides to do some kind things, but he is also a German army officer leading the occupation of the town. Key discussion questions: • Is the Caporal a good or bad character? Of course, other themes and ideas might emerge from reading and discussing the book: conservation, loss, communication, war, as well as the chance to explore an important moment in history.
Using the resource This resource shares an extract from the story, describing the moment when the occupying army arrives in the town. After reading the text, there is a set of short teaching activities considering the author’s craft and effective features of descriptive writing, with a specific focus on using sentence structure and syntax to create excitement and a varied rhythm. There is also a sheet with a storytelling challenge based on the extract. For Flamingo Boy it focuses on sharing an exciting moment in a story, using sentences of different length to create atmosphere and develop a storyteller’s voice. 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, 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 a bookshop.
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. 91, 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 an extract that describes the arrival of the German army to a small town in the south of France. Up until now, German soldiers have not reached this area, so the townsfolk are seeing them for the first time. 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 what is happening in the scene. Ask the children to read through the extract again in pairs, discussing how Michael Morpurgo shows how people reacted to the arrival of the soldiers. They may focus on: •
Vocabulary choices (shock, silenced, disbelief)
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Actions in the story (music stopped playing; carousel stopped turning)
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Small details that show how quiet it is (you can now hear the leaves rustling)
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Ask the children: why did the townsfolk react in this way?
Slide 4 Ask the children to look at Michael Morpurgo’s use of different sentence lengths in the extract and how they create a sense of rhythm and pace. In pairs, ask them to read aloud the long, multi-clause sentence at the start and then contrast this with short, punchy sentences that follow (see next slide). Slide 5 Ask the children: what is the effect of these different sentence structures on how you read
them aloud? How does the contrast between the long descriptive sentence and the short sentences with action help to emphasize the change in atmosphere? Explain to the children that varying the length and rhythm of sentences can help to add variety and emphasis to different ideas when telling a story. Short sentences can be effective for conveying action or making the reader stop and notice the importance of a point. They can work well when contrasted with longer sentences, so they stand out. Slide 6 Tell the children they are going to practise using a mixture of longer and shorter sentences in their own storytelling. Ask the children to think of a moment in a story which is exciting. It might be a new story that they have invented or a retelling of a moment in a story they know well. In pairs, children can tell the exciting moment to each other, trying to use a mixture of short and longer sentences. They can then try writing their scenes and then sharing these with other people in the class. After they have written their scenes, ask the children to reflect on their use of different sentence lengths: how do their choices affect how the scenes sound when read aloud? Do they help them to sound exciting and capture the attention of their reader?