English In The Primary School

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English Assignment – Part A English in the Primary School By Paul Lewis English in the Primary School Selecting a story The book I chose to read to the children in my year one top ability class was, ‘The Gruffalo’, by Julia Donaldson. This book is suitable to the interests and linguistic needs of the children and contains many features laid out by the literacy strategy to teach at both sentence and text level. These take into account grammatical features such as, speech marks, verbs and views on characters through performances and sequencing. For any book that is read to or by children, it is important for them to be able to understand the structure of the story. This would enable them to become captivated and interested in listening attentively or reading it. This book has the potential in helping children develop cognitively, linguistically and socially and emotionally. The main events of the story are easily accessible to the children. Huw Thomas (1998, Pg15 ) states ‘By looking at the common structure in stories we can enhance our use of all the different stories we read in the classroom.’ This statement highlights the importance of allowing children to become familiar with the main structures of a story, namely the concept of a beginning, middle and end. The main events that take shape in the Gruffalo are that of a clever mouse who takes a walk through the woods, then meets a fox, owl and snake. All the animals would like to have the mouse for lunch. However, cleverly, the mouse, tells them he is having lunch with a Gruffalo and in turn they all get frightened and leave the mouse alone. To the mouse’s surprise he sees a Gruffalo, who also thinks the mouse looks good for lunch, but the clever little mouse assures him, he is the scariest creature in the woods. He gets the Gruffalo to follow him back through

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