Meerkat Mail

Product Information

We discover how different all of his relatives’ lives are through the pop-out postcards from each place he visits. This activity encourages creativity and your classes writing skills will see improvement as their storytelling is confined to a small space. One teacher took a toy Meerkat to her local park and took pictures of him doing various activities (e.

But, there were a few bummers: the writing wasn't always incredible (though it was good), and what bothered me the most was how after a while the author quit naming the "relatives" that our meerkat would visit. It’s also a fabulous way to develop geography, PSHE, art and history through a theme such as ‘amazing animals’. It is against copyright to take and reproduce the text/pictures directly from a published book, so we always try to use our texts for the units based on the original. When we had found all of the key features we started to discuss what we could put in our own postcards to Sunny.g. climbing the monkey bars), then the children selected one or two of the pictures and wrote a postcard based on that.

This could be expanded further by the children being put into groups based on which scene they selected and creating a drama piece based on the story. But as he travels from the barnyard through the forest to the city, Sunny realizes there's no place like home.

The children can then conduct a guided tour of the school with Sunny, taking photos of him in different places, answering any questions he may have and ‘helping’ him join in activities. Similar in content (if not in style) to the story Marsupial Sue Book and CD, the story explores the differences between the related animals. Although there are some more complex newspaper articles in the front and back of the book that would almost definitely need to be read by a parent.

He sends back a postcard from each place he stays, inserted into the book as a flap for children to lift and read the message on the back. Meerkat Mail is a favourite amongst lots of young children and using these resources can extend your children's learning. A little Meerkat thinks he can find a more 'perfect' home than his current home, in the desert with his family. Read examples of nonchronological reports about animals and start to develop a bank of common features. 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’.I like how the book starts off with a character description/ timeline of how the main character develops. 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. Meerkat Mail by Emily Gravett is a great animal story to use in EYFS and KS1 when covering a journeys or animals topic.