Introduce Sunny – either through an image or a meerkat stuffed toy, it will be a good investment! Read the whole text using a visualiser to amplify the images on your IWB. The illustrations convey as much as the text, and children can be helped to understand events, feelings, character details and motivations by close reading of both. Spring 2/ Summer 1 - Growing/Minibeasts - Aaaarrgghh, Spider! Once There were Giants - Celebrations Read Meerkat Mail with your class and show them the interactive features where your class can pull out and read Sunny's postcards to his family. Once you've got all your students on board with this great story, introduce some of these resources into your teaching to extend your students' learning.

Launch your topic with a visit from a wild animal sanctuary (meerkats included, if possible). Discuss and record what the children know about these particular animals and support them in preparing their questions for the visit. Immerse the children in visual images and film clips if there is no animal sanctuary near to you and then role-play a wild animal expert for the children to ‘hot-seat’. In the words of a certain car insurance obsessed meerkat, a book project using Meerkat Mailby Emily Gravett is ‘simples!’, especially if you use the Talk for Writing process. As a core story for a half term it is perfect for KS1 – with plenty of text types to focus on, captivating illustrations, quirky characters and lots of humour. It’s also a fabulous way to develop geography, PSHE, art and history through a theme such as ‘amazing animals’. 1 There’s no place like home? An ideal unit of work to cover a short 5 week term. Based on the try use prove method, with Pie Corbett talk for writing. These plans are easily adaptable for a single year group, Y1 or Y2. Each plan is for 2 weeks, but would be easily extended to 3 weeks each for a longer term with extra grammar lessons or short burst writes.

6 Develop context & understanding

With a huge range of resources, you can bring Meerkat Mail into different subjects and use this great story to engage your students' learning. What do these Meerkat Mail resources teach? Meerkat Mail is a lovely children's short story by Emily Gravett that follows Sunny the Meerkat as he goes off on his travels. Meerkat Mail is a favourite amongst lots of young children and using these resources can extend your children's learning. What does this book teach you about meerkats? Use this information (along with your own research) to create a report about them. Take photos of Sunny at the local park, eating something, in different weather, etc. Share these images with the children, explaining they where taken on Sunny’s latest adventure. Model writing a postcard from Sunny to his family, using the information headings to structure the content. The children can then conduct a guided tour of the school with Sunny, taking photos of him in different places, answering any questions he may have and ‘helping’ him join in activities. The children can then write their own postcard from Sunny about his trip to their school. 4 Did you know? Read examples of nonchronological reports about animals and start to develop a bank of common features. Use role-play and games such as ‘Professor Know it All’* to develop the language and sentence constructions of reports.

The story begins in the Kalahari Desert. Can you find out where this is? How far is it from where you live? Talk for Writing across the Curriculum, Pie Corbett and Julia Strong (OUP, 2011) *includes Professor Know it All gameWhole Class Reading resources and planning for Year 2 in a zip file based on Emily Gravett’s ‘Meerkat Mail’ book based on early inference skills. As the teacher read the book to the children she asked them questions such as ‘what do you think will happen next?’ and ‘how do you think he is feeling here?’. This encourages the children to think more deeply and engage with the story which should help them when they come to do the following tasks. Using this Empty Suitcase Activity your students can draw what they think Sunny the Meerkat would need on his travels around the world. This task gets your class thinking about what items they believe would be essential for travel and what they would like to take. This worksheet provides your students with a sense of independence as they make choices for Sunny. This activity is also a great drawing task and will help develop your students' fine motor skills and allows them to get creative. Carry out some role-play activities with ‘Sunny’ in which he explores how he is feeling at different points in the story. For some real fun and creativity try out this great 3D Meerkat Paper Model Activity.Your class can make their very own Sunny out of paper with this great activity. Encourage your students to keep this Meerkat and take him with them on their own travels. They can take pictures and show the rest of the class where Sunny has been. Who is Sunny the Meerkat?

We turned the narrative poem (The Spider and the Fly) into a playscript, by setting it out correctly and adding detailed stage directions. We then acted them out in assembly, for Years 5 and 6. The most significant activity that this book inspires is English - writing postcards. In Year 1 classes, I've seen children write postcards *in the style of* Sunny, or writing *as if they were* Sunny, going on new adventures. One teacher took a toy Meerkat to her local park and took pictures of him doing various activities (e.g. climbing the monkey bars), then the children selected one or two of the pictures and wrote a postcard based on that. The older children could write more sophisticated postcards, while younger children could focus on following a pre-set template. Edit * after recently teaching this unit, I changed the plan for current usage. I have added new resources to this bundle A huge load of resources to use, 13 separate uploads. I’ve added some pictures of provision in my classroom as it has really engaged my children in writing!* This is a sorry about a meerkat who gets fed up with the hot weather and crowded environment with all the other meerkats so decided to travel around Africa to find somewhere better to live.

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Using the book as part of a project on ‘amazing animals’, precede the actual reading of it with a week of experiences and research focusing on animals, including some or all of the following. An exciting and interactive picture book that brings children on a journey alongside Sunny the Meerkat to find out where he belongs. Although, other picture books focus around telling stories like this with animals, the way that Gravett presents the narrative through postcards aids in making this story unique and exciting.