A memoir for childen aged 12 and over, Alex Bertie’s Trans Mission: My Quest to a Beard (Wren & Rook) is a demystifying wander through the author’s life, from a transformative haircut to the various milestones – coming out to family, getting a doctor’s letter, starting testosterone – that mark his progress. At a time when trans identity can sometimes become a contentious issue, this engaging, humorous account, conveying deep feeling without straying into hysteria, is invaluable for anyone who is or who knows a transgender person. In art, Yr4 focused on using different media to design and create their own garden. They used sharpies to design their own pebble to decorate our own school garden. We thought about what would happen if the animals escaped on the ark and learned all about vibration, by using different instruments and experimenting with elastic bands and rulers. We then presented our work to some of our friends and discussed what we had enjoyed about the project. Mayhew uses paper collage and linocut illustrations to achieve wonderful colours and depth. The use of blue, the darkening of the colours during the rains, the wonderful lightness as the sun reappears and the rain stops, is very effective. The illustrations of the rain with vertical lines changing in intensity and the swirling clouds and tempestuous seas are very effective. This contrasts brilliantly with the calm still bright blue after the storm. The mythical creatures are each wonderful collages. Keep a weather diary, or make a weather chart, and count how many days it rains in a week/ month. If there is a very rainy day, collect rainwater in a jam jar or measuring jug, and see how many centimetres of rain has fallen.

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Mrs Noah saved several mythical animals, including unicorns, dragons and griffins. Make a zig zag book for your child to draw illustrations of them. You could write some information together too ( see links below). Make up a story togetherFind out more Listen to a version of the original Noah’s Ark story here Find out more about weather and climate change

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Year 4KM delved into the Mrs Noah’s stories to link with our time away from school and talk about our feelings. In English, the children created their own hybrid ‘mythical creatures’ and then wrote non-chronological reports to give details about what they look like, their diets and their habitats. Andy Mulligan’s Dog (Pushkin), though less overtly fantastical, is another animal story with a difference. At its heart is the pain of rejection, felt both by unhappy boy Tom and by Spider, the runty reject puppy with the projecting tooth to whom Tom gives his heart after his parents’ separation. But Spider’s expensive mishaps and Tom’s ferocious anger – not to mention school bullies and the cruelties of an arachnid called Thread – seem to militate against a happy ending. Poignant, funny, savage and ultimately uplifting, this is Mulligan at the top of his challenging form. Using musical instruments, we completed some science showing how sounds travel, while making sounds that would be found in the garden.Those with strong stomachs, and a taste for still more sinister tales, should plunge with relish into Christmas Dinner of Souls (Faber), a splendidly rancid read from Ross Montgomery, with bug-eyed pictures from David Litchfield. An errant boy finds himself doomed to serve a disgusting Christmas dinner to the unsavoury faculty of Soul’s College – and to hear the gruesome stories accompanying each course. Will he make it through the night alive? This gleefully grisly departure from Montgomery’s gentler previous style should appeal to Goosebumps fans. Mrs Noah’s Garden is forthcoming in 2020….Mr Noah builds a house from the ark while Mrs Noah develops her garden. One to look forward to. Mrs Noah told her children stories about unicorns, dragons and other mythical creatures. Try making up one together one or more of the mythical animals. Children could decide which animals are in the story and you could take turns Make a rainy-day picture Before you start sharing the story you might want to talk about the story of Noah’s Ark (see link below with a retelling). Read the story aloud to your child pausing to talk about what is happening in the story and the illustrations. Join in

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What might Mr Noah say when he finds the creatures he tried to get rid of still exist? You pretend to be Mr Noah and Mrs Noah and have an imaginary conversation. Talk about the decisions the characters made in the story – Mr Noah deciding to get rid of ‘troublesome’ creatures and Mrs Noah deciding to save them. Find out about different types of weather, using the internet and information books. Talk about the difference between a shower and torrential rain that causes floods. Talk about climate changeIn her enthralling debut, I Have No Secrets (Electric Monkey), Penny Joelson undertakes a difficult task, narrating from the perspective of a character without speech: 14-year-old Jemma, who has cerebral palsy. Relishing her apparent helplessness, her carer’s boyfriend confides to her that he has committed a murder – but when a technological advance offers Jemma the chance of a voice, she becomes a danger to him. Both a compelling thriller and a warm, lively portrait of unusual family life, Joelson’s first book marks her out as a writer to watch. We then read ‘Mrs Noah’s Garden’ which was focusing on renewal and starting afresh, just like we were doing in school.

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In the original story Mr Noah is the main character making the decisions, sharing this book might lead to discussions about the role of women and girls in history and traditional stories. Look together at the rainy day pictures in the book and make your own. You could try with crayon or paint or draw lines, dashes and dots with a candle on paper and then paint with well diluted blue paint or ink. Be a weather spotter The language is beautiful, opening with the extremely simple sentence “it rained” and continuing with rich evocative sentences, until “then one morning everyone awoke to silence”.

Mr Noah is busy building the ark and sorting out the pairs of animals to join him, anxious at the same time to ensure that the ‘troublesome creatures’ are not included. There is no explanation of which animals fall into this category. Meanwhile, Mrs Noah is busy sewing, clue in the title, and visiting parts of the woods that are her special domain. Mysterious and intriguing, what she is doing is not revealed until the ark finally finds land after the great rains and we see, in a series of beautiful illustrations, the fantastical creatures she has saved.