Michael Morpurgo Month 2020: The Fox and the Ghost King Cover Sheet

The Fox and the Ghost King 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 the use of rhetorical questions in the children’s own storytelling.

The Fox and the Ghost King In a cosy den under a garden shed lives a family of foxes. They love to watch football – all foxes do. But their favourite team keeps losing and losing, and it seems like things will never look up.

That is, until Daddy Fox finds the ghost of a king buried underneath a car park. A king who wishes only to be free.

“Release me,” says the Ghost King, “and I can do anything. Just tell me your greatest wish.”

For these football-loving foxes, might everything be about to change…?

Themes and ideas The Fox and the Ghost King is a delightful story that weaves history, football and animals together into a magical tale. When reading the whole text with a class it gives lots of opportunities for talk and discussion, including:

Magic and reality In the story, the ghost of King Richard III promises to help the fox family’s favourite football team, Leicester City, to win. They go on to win the Premier League (something that happened in real life in 2016).

Key discussion questions: • Which parts of the story are real? Which bits have been imagined by Michael Morpurgo? Which bits might be real?

Using the resource This resource shares a newspaper front page which uses a string of rhetorical questions to pique the reader’s interest, before going on to answer them. After reading the text, there is a set of short teaching activities that explore the author’s craft and the use of rhetorical questions in the children’s own storytelling.

There is also a sheet with a storytelling challenge based on the extract. For The Fox and the Ghost King it focuses on using rhetorical questions to capture the reader’s attention. 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 a bookshop.

Illustrations © Michael Foreman, 2016

Teacher’s notes for the PowerPoint Slide 2 Share the front cover and blurb to introduce the book and give some context. If you are reading the whole novel as a class, the activities in this resource come from a newspaper article at the end of the book, so you could read the story first or start with this section.

Slide 3 Tell the children that this is an extract from a newspaper article at the end of the book by Michael Morpurgo. Read aloud together (either with the teacher reading aloud and children following, children reading together as a class or children reading together in pairs). Then ask the children what it is about (someone will certainly know that it is football!)

Working in pairs, ask the children to identify any unfamiliar words and phrases (“the Foxes”; “5000-1 outsiders”, perhaps). Explain the meaning of these terms, drawing on the knowledge of other children in the class. (You might wish to search online to find a real newspaper backpage from the day Leicester City won the Premier League in 2016.)

Ask the children to comment on structure of the start of this newspaper article. What features do they notice (name of newspaper; headline)? Then ask them to look at the four sentences that open the text. What do they notice about them (they are all questions)?

Ask the children: why might a newspaper article begin with questions? Explain that these are rhetorical questions – the writer doesn’t expect an answer to them, instead they are used for effect. In this case they “wonder out loud”, contrasting some different opinions and engaging the reader, before the writer goes on to answer them.

Illustrations © Michael Foreman, 2016

Slide 4 Ask the children to read this section – how does it relate to the questions (it answers them)? Explain to the children that asking and answering rhetorical questions can be useful when they write non-fiction texts or tell stories. It voices a question the audience might have (or might not have) thought of yet, and then allows the storyteller to answer it.

Slide 5 Tell the children they are going to practise beginning a story with a rhetorical question, following the instructions above. Once they have practised telling their story to a partner, they could write their story down.

Encourage children to remember this technique when they come to write or tell other stories in other contexts.