The Lighthouse Keeper's Lunch

Product Information

The book tells the story of Mr Grinling, the lighthouse keeper, and the trouble his wife has getting his lunch across from the mainland.

Extend your sea topic into the history of the sea by looking at boats from history, and at the pirates who have roamed the seas throughout history. The wonderful vocabulary within the story is in itself a great reason for choosing this book to start your topic.

Introduce your children to the story of Grace Darling, an early heroine of lighthouse keepers and lifeboats. The activities here would work well with a Y2 class, but could easily be adapted for younger or older pupils.

Get the children to study a variety of lighthouses and talk about the requirements for an effective design. Offer a range of materials to choose from, and encourage your children to think about texture as well as colour, and to work in three dimensions. Encourage them to think creatively and to come up with wild and unusual ideas, as well as the more obvious suggestions. They should then work out how to fix this into their lighthouse model, so that the light appears at the top inside the lantern section.

Get your pupils to include the seascape which surrounds the lighthouse, as well as the lighthouse itself. Mrs Grinling prepares her husband a delicious lunch, but the seagulls keep eating it before it reaches him. Now divide the children into pairs or groups, and ask them to come up with some alternative plans for stopping the seagulls eating the lunch. If possible, get the children to test some of their ideas for getting the lunch safely across to the lighthouse, setting up a line in your classroom, similar to that which runs over to the lighthouse. Compare the children’s feelings about pirates with their impressions from the Grace Darling story: what does being ‘brave’ actually mean?

Ask your class to re-tell the story, creating a dramatised version of the exciting events of the night when Grace Darling helped rescue the survivors. The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch, by Ronda and David Armitage, is a brilliant book for inspiring classroom activities around the topic of the sea, its history and the brave people who keep us safe at the seaside and away from dry land. Avery effective way to re-tell the story is as a series of frozen images, with sea and storm sound effects added to create atmosphere.Your children will love the chance to design pirate costumes, to dress up as pirates, to perform some pirate songs to an assembly or at a school show. Talk with the children about the different methods Mrs Grinling tries in her attempts to foil the seagulls. After several failed attempts, she finally manages to foil the pesky birds with some mustard flavoured sandwiches! Sue Cowley takes The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch as inspiration for four fun-filled, ocean-themed activities. Get your children thinking about what these new words mean, using the sound and the context to help them work it out.

Once their lighthouses are built, show the children how to make a complete circuit with a battery, wire and bulb. Once the children have created their designs, offer the class a variety of resources with which to make a three-dimensional model. More able, or older, pupils could explore various options for getting their light to rotate inside the lighthouse. Supply them with cardboard rolls and sheets of various shapes and sizes, collage materials such as sand and cotton wool, paints, sticky plastic, crepe paper, cellophane or clear film for the lantern so that the light will shine through it, and so on. Can your children give examples where they have seen or heard about someone doing something ‘brave’?