Flamingo Boy This is one of sixteen resources that you can use with your class to celebrate Michael Morpurgo Month in February, or to explore books from the world famous author at any other time of the year. Each resource is built around an extract but also shares some of the key themes from the complete story that make the book such a rich and enjoyable text to share with your class. The extracts can be read with the class using the accompanying PowerPoints, and there are teacher notes and pupil challenges to help children develop their own story-writing skills. This activity looks at how Michael Morpurgo uses sentence structure and syntax to create excitement and a varied rhythm in his descriptive writing.
Flamingo Boy A young autistic boy lives on his parents’ farm among the salt flats of the Camargue in the south of France, an area populated by flamingos. There are lots of things he doesn’t understand: but he does know how to heal animals. Every week he goes to market with his mother, to ride his special horse on the town carousel. But then the Germans come; a soldier shoots a flamingo from the sky. The carousel is damaged, the horses broken. For this vulnerable boy, everything is falling apart. Only there’s a kind sergeant among the Germans – a man with a young boy of his own at home, a man who trained as a carpenter. Between them, perhaps boy and man can mend what has been broken – and maybe even the whole town…
Themes and ideas Flamingo Boy is a wonderfully rich text to explore with a Key Stage 2 class. The themes that might come from sharing the text are: