Mrs Noah's Pockets

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In art, Yr4 focused on using different media to design and create their own garden. They used sharpies to design their own pebble to decorate our own school garden. Find out more Listen to a version of the original Noah’s Ark story here Find out more about weather and climate change Those with strong stomachs, and a taste for still more sinister tales, should plunge with relish into Christmas Dinner of Souls (Faber), a splendidly rancid read from Ross Montgomery, with bug-eyed pictures from David Litchfield. An errant boy finds himself doomed to serve a disgusting Christmas dinner to the unsavoury faculty of Soul’s College – and to hear the gruesome stories accompanying each course. Will he make it through the night alive? This gleefully grisly departure from Montgomery’s gentler previous style should appeal to Goosebumps fans. Look together at the rainy day pictures in the book and make your own. You could try with crayon or paint or draw lines, dashes and dots with a candle on paper and then paint with well diluted blue paint or ink. Be a weather spotter

Mrs Noah’s Pockets | James Mayhew

We then read ‘Mrs Noah’s Garden’ which was focusing on renewal and starting afresh, just like we were doing in school. A memoir for childen aged 12 and over, Alex Bertie’s Trans Mission: My Quest to a Beard (Wren & Rook) is a demystifying wander through the author’s life, from a transformative haircut to the various milestones – coming out to family, getting a doctor’s letter, starting testosterone – that mark his progress. At a time when trans identity can sometimes become a contentious issue, this engaging, humorous account, conveying deep feeling without straying into hysteria, is invaluable for anyone who is or who knows a transgender person. Find out about different types of weather, using the internet and information books. Talk about the difference between a shower and torrential rain that causes floods. Talk about climate change

Andy Mulligan’s Dog (Pushkin), though less overtly fantastical, is another animal story with a difference. At its heart is the pain of rejection, felt both by unhappy boy Tom and by Spider, the runty reject puppy with the projecting tooth to whom Tom gives his heart after his parents’ separation. But Spider’s expensive mishaps and Tom’s ferocious anger – not to mention school bullies and the cruelties of an arachnid called Thread – seem to militate against a happy ending. Poignant, funny, savage and ultimately uplifting, this is Mulligan at the top of his challenging form. The language is beautiful, opening with the extremely simple sentence “it rained” and continuing with rich evocative sentences, until “then one morning everyone awoke to silence”. Mrs Noah’s Garden is forthcoming in 2020….Mr Noah builds a house from the ark while Mrs Noah develops her garden. One to look forward to.

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In the original story Mr Noah is the main character making the decisions, sharing this book might lead to discussions about the role of women and girls in history and traditional stories. We thought about what would happen if the animals escaped on the ark and learned all about vibration, by using different instruments and experimenting with elastic bands and rulers. We then presented our work to some of our friends and discussed what we had enjoyed about the project. Using musical instruments, we completed some science showing how sounds travel, while making sounds that would be found in the garden. Talk about the decisions the characters made in the story – Mr Noah deciding to get rid of ‘troublesome’ creatures and Mrs Noah deciding to save them.

Before you start sharing the story you might want to talk about the story of Noah’s Ark (see link below with a retelling). Read the story aloud to your child pausing to talk about what is happening in the story and the illustrations. Join in Mrs Noah saved several mythical animals, including unicorns, dragons and griffins. Make a zig zag book for your child to draw illustrations of them. You could write some information together too ( see links below). Make up a story together Year 4KM delved into the Mrs Noah’s stories to link with our time away from school and talk about our feelings. In English, the children created their own hybrid ‘mythical creatures’ and then wrote non-chronological reports to give details about what they look like, their diets and their habitats. What might Mr Noah say when he finds the creatures he tried to get rid of still exist? You pretend to be Mr Noah and Mrs Noah and have an imaginary conversation.