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. 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. 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? 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.

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. 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.

4 Did you know?

An innovated version might involve Sunny trying to find a home at the seaside, in the supermarket, at an indoor play area – choose a place that will be familiar to the children. Or, if you would like to provide a little more challenge, you could also change the main character to another animal. This would mean that children’s versions could draw on information gained in their research. The written stories could then be made into a whole class book and included in the book area, read aloud in a story-share or recorded as a podcast. 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? 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.

Carry out some role-play activities with ‘Sunny’ in which he explores how he is feeling at different points in the story. 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. Spring 2/ Summer 1 - Growing/Minibeasts - Aaaarrgghh, Spider! Once There were Giants - Celebrations There are endless possibilities for using this text, but if you are the kind of person who likes a bit of a sequence, read on… 2 Starting the journey 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’.The story begins in the Kalahari Desert. Can you find out where this is? How far is it from where you live? 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. The other key link is to Geography - learning about the Kalahari Desert, and, in one class, they used that as a starting-off point to compare their local area to different countries which I think was a National Curriculum objective. Older children could perhaps select another animal from another location in the world, research that animal and location on Chromebooks/iPads, and write a series of postcards from that animal's perspective as it discovers unfamiliar environments. Or, perhaps as a September transition activity, children could use the postcard theme to write about their summer holidays.