Michael Morpurgo Month 2020: Pigs Might Fly (Mudpuddle Farm) Cover Sheet

Pigs Might Fly 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 lesson looks at how different prepositions can be used to add detail.

Pigs Might Fly! Join the fun on the farm! This book features two charming stories for younger readers about a loveable family of all sorts of animals, living behind the tumbledown barn on Mudpuddle Farm.

It’s a long, hot summer, and Pintsize the piglet wonders if it might be cooler in the sky. But when he tries to fly he annoys just about everyone. It’s time he learned his lesson…

The Mudpuddle Farm books are always popular with primary-aged children, full of funny adventures and silly characters. They also have the added benefit of being a series, so if children enjoy one, they can read the other books in the set!

Using the resource This resource shares an extract from Pigs Might Fly!, the first story in the book, where the farm animals are trying to decide how they can escape the hot sun. After reading the text, there are suggested discussion activities considering how different prepositions can be used to add detail and help a reader to imagine what is happening in a text.

There is also a sheet with a storytelling challenge based on the extract.

For Pigs Might Fly! it focuses on using different prepositions to create variety and add detail for a reader. 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.

Teacher’s notes for the PowerPoint Slide 2 Share the front cover and blurb to introduce the book and give context.

have described all the different places that the animals went in a list like this. Perhaps, because:

If you a reading the whole book, the extract used in this resource comes from p. 25, so read up until that point.

•

Each one tells you a bit about the character (Egbert the goat is greedy, Diana the sheep is silly).

If you’re using this extract as an introduction to the book, tell the children that it is a very hot day on the farm and the animals are not sure what to do, so they visit Albertine the wise goose to ask for advice.

•

The long sentence suggests the idea that they have all set off to different places at the same time.

Slide 3 Tell the children that the extract opens with Albertine the wise goose telling the other animals what to do in the hot sun.

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 talk to a partner and quickly recap where each of the different animals go. Ask the children: •

Why is Diana the sheep different to the other animals?

•

What does this tell you about her?

Slide 4 Ask the children to look at the words in bold.

In pairs, ask them to discuss what these words tell the reader. Draw out that they tell you where the different animals are.

Depending on the age of the class, you might tell them that these words are prepositions, a class of words and phrases that tells you how nouns link to other words. They often describe locations or directions, like they do here.

Ask the children why Michael Morpurgo might

Slide 5 Ask the children to look at this version. What do they think of it? Do they prefer this version or Michael Morpurgo’s version from the previous slide. Why? Suggest to the children that Michael Morpugo’s use of different prepositions helps the reader to imagine the scene because it gives plenty of detail. It also adds some variety, which is missing in this version.

Slide 6 Tell the children that they are going to practise using a range of prepositions to add detail to their own storytelling. (If you are not using the term “prepositions”, then simply replace with “words”.)

Ask the children to think of a moment in a story where the characters go in different directions. This 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 moment to each other, trying to use different prepositions to describe where the characters go.

They can then try writing their scenes down and sharing these with other people in the class.