English – Friday 5th June
Watch the
video of a presenter reading the second extract.
Charlie Changes into a Chicken.
Read
extract 1 and try activity 1 below.
Extract 1
The
sound of his parents arguing downstairs rumbled through the house, low like
thunder. Charlie closed his book. He couldn't concentrate.
Darkness
had fallen outside and the street light outside Charlie's window was making
uncanny shadows on his bedroom wall.
The
silhouettes of the tree branches looked a little too much like log clutching
witches' fingers for Charlie's liking. So, quick as a flash, he sprang out of
bed and pulled his curtains together.
It was
there and then that it first happened.
It
began with a twitching in his eye. Charlie froze to the spot, feeling his
eyelid blink manically. His eye had twitched before, when he’d been tired, but
this felt different somehow. It felt like somebody had just plugged
him into a wall socket. The twitching spread to his other eye, and both eyes
were blinking and twitching.
A
feeling burst through the whole of his body, like he’d just been shot through
an electrical wire, like he was the electricity.
Every
part of his body fizzed and hummed. The fizzing and humming became stronger,
until he felt like he was on fire, but a fire inside of a never-ending tube,
squeezed and vibrating.
His
skin felt extraordinary. Alive. He looked at his arm and, with some
considerable alarm, saw that hair was sprouting out of every part of his skin.
Weirdly the room was growing larger too.
But no,
Charlie realized, the room wasn’t growing larger – it was him who was shrinking!
Activity 1
1. Read extract 1
again, in which the writer explains in great detail how Charlie begins to
change.
2. Retell what happens
to Charlie in five steps.
You might want to point to, jot down or underline key phrases to help
you to sequence the events.
Use time adverbials to support you when you are retelling his change.
Examples of adverbials include:
·
First
· Next
·
Then
·
After that
·
Finally
Top tip!
You can do this activity verbally (by speaking) or you could write it
down.
Try to remember as much detail as you can about the event.
Extract 2
He
reached up with one of his new, long, spindly black legs and carefully counted
his eyes. There were eight.
Eight
legs? Eight eyes? Veeery suspicious.
So
Charlie looked at all the suspicious evidence and added small + hairy + eight
spindly black legs + eight eyes together and got spider as the answer because
it is a well-known fact that spiders are hairy and have eight legs and eight
eyes. It’s a less-known fact that spiders also have eight bums, which is both
disgusting and messy and also costs spiders loads of money in toilet roll.
Charlie
sat on the floor and considered his predicament. He had turned into a spider
and he had no idea how to spider. He’d had lots of practice being a boy, but
zero practice spidering. After a short while just sitting there being a spider,
Charlie came up with a plan. The plan had two simple steps. They were:
Step 1:
PANIC!!!
Step 2:
Shout to his mum to come and help.
Activity 2
In extract 2, the writer Sam Copeland uses lots of description in his
writing which helps the reader to imagine the scene.
Read some of the examples from the second extract in the table below and
explain how they help you to visualise and imagine what is happening.
You can either create a table of your answers or talk about your
responses.
