Story Maps

We know the sequence of Monkey Puzzle so well now, we can even draw story maps of the events in the story! We can then tell the story using our story map to help us!

 

You can do this for any story - Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, The Smartest Giant in Town, even your own story!

It helps with sequencing events in a story, and encourages fluency in being able to verbalise a story, leading to greater fluency for thinking and writing stories.

Why don't you try one yourself?

Animal Pictograms

Reception have done a pictogram to find out which jungle animal is our favourite. We had five animals to choose from. We cut out our chosen picture and added it to the right place on the pictogram.

We were then able to answer lots of questions easily by looking at our chart. Can you see:

Which jungle animal was chosen the most?

Which animal was only chosen 3 times?

How many people chose the tiger and the monkey altogether?

How many more times was the crocodile chosen than the monkey?

Mrs Howe chose the tiger as her favourite. Which animal would you have chosen and why?

You could make your own pictogram for favourite colour power-ranger, favourite food, colour of cars you see out of your window, anything!

A Pandemonium of Parrots

We now have a 'company' or 'pandemonium' of parrots in our jungle corner! (No, I didn't know that was the collective noun for a group of parrots either!)

They really are a funny bunch, and any resemblance to the penguin in Wallace and Gromit with a rubber glove on his head is purely accidental! All made by us!

First, choose which colour of card you would like and draw round your foot onto it. (This is harder than it looks!) This will be the body.

Then, do some colourful hand-painting (about 7 should be plenty). Remember to roll your sleeves up, wear an apron and not touch anything until you are clean again!

Note: Some children will thoroughly enjoy getting stuck in!

 Finally, when everything is dry and cut out, assemble your 'feathers' to make a 'pretty polly'! Add googly eyes and a beak to finish.

Don't you think they look fantastic?!

Rhyming Paper Chains

We are still loving reading Monkey Puzzle, and can remember a lot of the words now. We've noticed that it is written in rhyme and enjoy listening out for and saying the rhyming words. So, we played a rhyming pairs game in small groups, using our phonics to sound out and blend the words, and then wrote our own rhyming words to make paper chain vines for our jungle corner! I wonder what rhyming words you can think of.

A Curious Thing Happened...!

When we came into school on Tuesday, we found a very sad Curious George. He had lost his banana and needed help to find it! Together, we followed the clues around the school, sometimes having to work out Fred-talk words like 'c-a-n' and 'h-e-l-p', and eventually found it in Mrs Glister's office! We enjoyed collecting the cheeky little monkeys along the way and working together.

We even found a (rather cold) monkey hiding with a clue in the staffroom freezer with the ice-packs!

Reunited at last! George was very grateful.

George must have been hungry, because when we came back after break he had eaten all of his banana! Fred was shocked it had gone so quickly.

No, no, no! That's a...!

After becoming illustrators, we thought we'd try our hand at a being authors! We decided we wanted to add a new animal to the Monkey Puzzle, so we thought of fantastic descriptions like spiky, sharp teeth, claws, long tail and large. Can you guess what it is yet?

Of course! It's a crocodile!

If I could be any jungle animal...

We thought again of all the jungle animals we've been looking at, in books, pictures and video clips, and discussed which animal we would be and why. Some children chose animals that could run really fast and climb trees, others thought it would be great to fly or swing through trees, and some chose deadly animals like the colourful poisonous dart-frog!

Why not take a look at some fantastic jungle animal clips on the Deadly 60 website! There's loads of amazing things to learn!