My brief for this blog was to make it spooky - it being nearly Halloween. I then trawled the internet for the best historical spooky tv series and found one - The Living and the Dead - which really piqued my interest. The main character, played by Colin Morgan of Merlin fame, is a farmer who is driven to explore what happens after death. It was made for the BBC in 2016. Unfortunately, for some reason I have not been able to fathom, it is not available on iPlayer. So, there went that idea. That left me back at square one, with the Historical and Spooky guidelines not really helping. None of the others caught my interest quite enough. Perhaps, after I'd found The Living and the Dead , I didn't really feel like anything else was going to be as good. So Virginia suggested Ghosts . Ghosts ? Spooky - of course. Historical - not really! But she pointed out that there is a multi-timeline which happens in the series, as we continue to discover more and more about the individual ghosts...
As promised, here is my 2nd class novel suggestion for a primary school classroom. It has been tried and tested in my own classroom and the children loved it.
"Children of Green Knowe" by Lucy Boston is a really great story to read in the lead-up to Christmas.
"Children of Green Knowe" by Lucy Boston is a really great story to read in the lead-up to Christmas.
Here is the blurb from Goodreads:
""Tolly" Toseland 7 is rowed up to great-gran Linnet Oldknow by servant Boggis - there has always been a Boggis at Green Knowe. The real "castle" is over 900 years old. Gran tells old family stories, and songs. Over the generations there have been many who can see, hear, and feel the ghosts, evoked by white-on-black illustrations. Toby 14, Alexander, and Linnet 6 linger after the Plague, as does the cursed topiary Green Noah."
While it is my policy to use the blurbs from Goodreads on my blog, quite frankly, I don't think this blurb does the book justice. It seems to have been written by someone who is trying to bring the book up to date. And, yes, the story is quite old fashioned but what is wrong with that? Sometimes we need a bit old-fashioned.
The children in my class really enjoyed this book, complete with animals, ghosts and a rather scary tree. There are some lessons to be drawn from this book and I will post the lesson plans tomorrow (Friday).
Happy World Book Day!

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