This Morning I Met a Whale

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James Clements, education writer and former primary teacher, shares ideas for celebrating the master storyteller this February… As a child, I remember listening with baited breath as our headteacher read Friend or Foealoud in assembly. He was sure to always stop on a cliffhanger so we’d have to wait a whole week to find out what happened next. Let there be half an hour of storytime at the end of the day in primary schools up and down the country. Make this the half hour they all long for, that they don’t want to be over. Let the children go home dreaming of the story, reliving it, wondering.”

I thought the best thing I could do was to just keep talking. I couldn’t think what else to do. For a moment or two I didn’t know what else to say, and anyway I suddenly felt a bit stupid talking to him…”

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We have teamed up with Voice 21 to create a project to prepare pupils for their transition to secondary school and the next chapter of their educational journey. Pupils heading to Year 7 need growing confidence, strong language skills and the ability to express themselves, to develop their thinking skills and to communicate effectively.

Use Morpurgo’s tale of a boy who spies a bottlenose whale in the Thames as the centrepiece of your next Key Stage 2 storybook curriculum.

Keep up to date with your professional development

Asking children how they would feel if they suddenly saw a whale swimming in a river. Would they believe it was true? It has been exclusively created to be used with episode nine of the Author In Your Classroom podcast. This is a virtual ‘author visit’ you can share with children whenever you like, absolutely free!

This resource uses the moving and relevant environmental message of This Morning I Met a Whale by Michael Morpurgo to put oracy at the heart of transition: prompting high-quality discussion, developing skills such as questioning, clarifying and summarising, and building confidence in verbal presentation.Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Old_pallet IA18117 Openlibrary_edition Each worksheet features a variety of writing, comprehension and research activities for pupils to carry out. These include writing a timeline of Joan of Arc’s life and describing how you met your best friend. Pupils could then be challenged to use the word in their own writing. Tales retold Arthur, High King of Britain This is another lovely story by Michael Morpurgo, beautifully illustrated by Christian Birmingham. Michael lives in London, near Battersea Bridge. He loves to get up early to go bird watching on the River Thames when no one else is about. One morning the most extraordinary thing happened. He found a bottlenose whale that was almost beached in the river. Michael discovered that the beautiful creature had deliberately swum up the river, even though he knew it would be dangerous because he was looking for a child so that he could give it a very important message. Michael listened to the whale and promised that he would never forget the message and that he would tell others about it. Michael knew that he would keep this promise for the rest of his life.