The Way Back Home: Oliver Jeffers

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I need to stop judging books by their covers; it rarely works out for me. What a cover though, right? Unfortunately, the poetry did not live up to the cover for me.

I received an advance reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers. Your class must identify where the capital letters and full stops must go in the sentences/passages. You are going to start by reading the book so I won’t tell you too much about what happens but it features a boy with an aeroplane and an alien with a spaceship. When we were studying Up and Down, we learned how to draw the boy. There are three things to remember to help you when you are drawing: This poetry anthology was written with the panic and claustrophobia, the grief and the uncertainty, that the recent pandemic brought to all our lives. It is very personal, focusing on Peppernell's own losses and mental health struggles, but with themes that are universally experienced. I found many a beautiful passage to underline and much hope delivered after the very bleak first portion. Courtney Peppernell is a bestselling author from Sydney, Australia, best known for her Pillow Thoughts poetry collection. The series has achieved acclaimed success worldwide, with more than a million copies sold since the initial launch in 2017.

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Some of the illustrations use lots of pictures to show a single action (e.g. the boy putting on his pilot’s outfit and the conversation about fixing the two machines). Can you make a storyboard that shows an action / event? Your class will work on their questioning skills by reading the answers and writing a suitable question. You find evidence of small foot prints. Several large footprints cross in front of the smaller ones and continue without interruption. The small prints veer off sharply to the south. You find several footprints in the snow. It is clear that there was a struggle here. Large footprints lead off to the southeast. You can watch a short video about Oliver Jeffers here. You will see that he uses a small sketchbook,like the one that I showed you how to make last week, to record and develop his ideas.

I received an advanced reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley. We have also included a blank resource so that your Year 1 / Year 2 children can choose their own words using the sounds they are familiar with.Missionary Ada says, 'Hah, what isn't strange out here these days? Something is affecting the ice and snow, as I'm sure you can see. It, well, it moves. Its like its sort of alive. It crawls up walls or just on top of itself. That's what created all those spikey ice structures. It also seems to crawl into the bodies of the dead and causes them to move too. None of us know what's causing it, though we have our [suspicions] about who is behind it.' Write a sequel to the book in which the boy and the alien meet again. What might they do? Where might they go together? Although I actually quite liked some lines and quotes, most of which were really personal to Peppernell herself, I found that overall this collection didn't touch me the way I wanted it to. In some ways it felt a little surface level to me personally, especially since it's about themes we've probably all experienced during the pandemic times and thus were topics the author could've gone more "in depth" with. I think it has to do with the writing style, or maybe it's just to do with the fact that I'm a reader who's very inexperienced when it comes to prose and poetry (collections). Ada said that her mother would have headed directly home to Thurgadin from Ada's old post. So head toward Thurgadin on the most direct route and see what you can find.

I really loved the format of this short story/poetry collection. The way the different elements were organized and categorised, with the super cute illustrations throughout was really lovely. I feel like the author put a lot of effort in them. I felt mostly apathetic throughout book. A lot of the content was very repetitive and I wasn't a fan of the self-help, life coach tone. There were a few stories that reminded me of fables and parables, except that they completely missed the mark for me too. Your KS1 class can even cut out the sentences and arrange and rearrange accordingly. If you have numerous copies of the book they can cross reference using the book as and determine their accuracy for self assessment and reflection. There are different levels of difficulty so children can use prompts to help them. E.g. extra spacing and underlined capitals. A really lovely resource ready to use if you have Active Inspire for the flip charts - if not the PDFs are useful for the children's activities. I am looking forward to using these and they have given me lots of ideas and are beautifully presented.Before you start reading look at the cover together and talk about what the story might be about.As you read the story aloud pauseif your child wants to look at the pictures and talk about what is happening. Talk about the story Missionary Ada says, 'Well, my mother may be lost somewhere out there. She came to bring me lunch at my post on the very same day that they closed the gates to Thurgadin. She should have stayed home, but she is old and forgetful. Maybe she didn't remember that the gates were closing, maybe she thought she would have plenty of time. I don't blame her, I blame the guards at the gate. They never should have let her leave!? Ada's anger is only enhanced as tears start to pool in her eyes. 'I volunteered to stay out here, she did not. Now I don't know if she made it home or not and I can't find her without [help].'