Meerkat Mail

Product Information

Spring 2/ Summer 1 - Growing/Minibeasts - Aaaarrgghh, Spider! Once There were Giants - Celebrations

In the words of a certain car insurance obsessed meerkat, a book project using Meerkat Mailby Emily Gravett is ‘simples!’, especially if you use the Talk for Writing process. As a core story for a half term it is perfect for KS1 – with plenty of text types to focus on, captivating illustrations, quirky characters and lots of humour. It’s also a fabulous way to develop geography, PSHE, art and history through a theme such as ‘amazing animals’. 1 There’s no place like home?

Launch your topic with a visit from a wild animal sanctuary (meerkats included, if possible). Discuss and record what the children know about these particular animals and support them in preparing their questions for the visit. Immerse the children in visual images and film clips if there is no animal sanctuary near to you and then role-play a wild animal expert for the children to ‘hot-seat’. Read examples of nonchronological reports about animals and start to develop a bank of common features. Use role-play and games such as ‘Professor Know it All’* to develop the language and sentence constructions of reports. Read Meerkat Mail with your class and show them the interactive features where your class can pull out and read Sunny's postcards to his family. Once you've got all your students on board with this great story, introduce some of these resources into your teaching to extend your students' learning. With a huge range of resources, you can bring Meerkat Mail into different subjects and use this great story to engage your students' learning. What do these Meerkat Mail resources teach? The title of the book uses alliteration. Can you make up other potential book titles that also use alliteration?

Introduce Sunny – either through an image or a meerkat stuffed toy, it will be a good investment! Read the whole text using a visualiser to amplify the images on your IWB. The illustrations convey as much as the text, and children can be helped to understand events, feelings, character details and motivations by close reading of both.Once the children have learnt the text, then innovate with another animal, using facts gathered in the first week. Create a whole class report together orally and practise it, then allow the children to make up their own oral versions about the animal they researched in week one. Edit * after recently teaching this unit, I changed the plan for current usage. I have added new resources to this bundle A huge load of resources to use, 13 separate uploads. I’ve added some pictures of provision in my classroom as it has really engaged my children in writing!*