Synopsis: Part of the new ‘Read & Respond Interactive’ series, this CD-ROM provides a range of activities and teaching ideas for exploring Michael Morpurgo’s novel, backed up by a variety of on-screen resources.

Review: This multimedia resource aims to bring creative teaching approaches and the power of ICT together to enable quality engagement with Michael Morpurgo’s popular text. Targeted at Year 5-6 and drawing on objectives from the Renewed Literacy Framework, the CD provides teachers’ notes and resources for eleven extended literacy sessions. Opportunities for speaking and listening (including drama and group discussion) are fully exploited and there are suggestions for springing off into a wide variety of written outcomes: newspaper reports to radio plays, non-chronological reports to tourist brochures. The teaching sessions encourage engagement with the author’s writing style and consideration of over-arching issues and themes in the novel.

Less well represented are activities to draw out characterisation or the structure of the novel, and many of sessions do depend on a familiarity with the whole novel before they would work. As with most of the ‘Read and Respond’ series, the photocopiable pages are pretty miss-able. However, the CD does also provide a selection of video clips and images to bring the story’s setting to life, an interview with Morpurgo about the novel, and some well-chosen text extracts accompanied by Derek Jacobi’s excellent audio reading.

 The on-screen activities are fairly unsophisticated, but I did like the inclusion of interactive writing frames (the one for planning a non-chronological report seems particularly useful). The CD very much has the feel of a resource to dip into, rather than offering a well-developed teaching sequence to follow through the book. At £30, though, this is a fairly inexpensive ICT resource, and teachers planning a unit of work around  Kensuke’s Kingdom  will find some interesting new ideas to use and adapt.

2008-05-03