To engage with a text

Key Stage 2

English

King of the Sky by Nicola Davies

﻿Hi there, my name is Mr. Byrne-Smith and today we're going to be doing some reading together. This is the second of five lessons on Nicola Davies' King of the Sky. If you haven't yet watched lesson number one, please go and do that first. If you have, welcome back. Today, we're going to be engaging with the text. We're going to do some vocabulary work, and then we're going to read the rest of the story. So it's a good lesson! Let's make a start. Here's the agenda for today's lesson. First, we're going to recap the story so far. Then we're going to do some pre-vocabulary before reading the rest of the text and then summarising what we've read and what we've learned. In this lesson you'll need an exercise book or paper, a pencil, and then finally, of course you'll need your brain! So if you need to go off and get any of these things, please do that now. Okay. Let's recap what we've learned so far. Here we have five key events from the story. You'll notice, though, that they're jumbled up. Now your job is to put them in order. There is text on some of these images, but I'm not expecting you to read them. I'm expecting you to look at the image itself think about what it represents, and then to think about the order in which they came in the story. So look carefully. We have the soldiers by the wall. We have the boy and Mr. Evans with the train in the background. We have this scene with the factories and the chimneys. The boy leaning on the wall, and then Mr. Evans and the boy chatting by the pigeons. Pause the video now and have a think. Okay, so first we have this and this is kind of like a setting description almost. Obviously none of it's done with words, interestingly. Just the picture. But from this picture we get a really good indication of the town and the countryside surrounding where Mr. Evans and the boy live. Next we have the boy standing despondently in the doorway. He was very sad and upset. Then we have the boy talking to Mr. Evans about the pigeons. Then off they go on their journey to set the pigeons free some way down the railway tracks by 10, 15 miles. And finally, we have this image of a pigeon in war. This is an example of a pigeon in the wartime. The soldiers knelt by the war fighting. And off goes the pigeon. And that was the last page we got to last lesson. So we got up to this point, but no further. Today, you'll be pleased to hear we'll be continuing. Okay, time for us to do some pre-vocabulary which will help us with the rest of the text. First word is scoured. My turn, your turn. Scoured. Scoured. Now we're going to try and figure out what scoured means together. You can do it using a few techniques. First, here's scoured in a sentence. I scoured the sky for their return. And I actually took this from the text. So we're going to try and figure out what it means using the text and the accompanying images. I scoured the sky for their return. I scoured the sky for their return. So first it's really important to think about what type of word this might be, what the word class is. I'm going to give you four options. Verb, noun, adverb, adjective. This is one of those things. I scoured the sky for their return. Have a careful think. It's a verb. It's a doing or being word. A verb is a doing or a being word. I scoured the sky for their return. But what does that exactly mean? So let's imagine it's a doing word. I scoured the sky. I'm doing it now, but what's it actually mean when somebody does that? What are they doing? Here's the image that accompanied this phrase in the story. This is the boy scouring the sky for their return. And the "their" refers to the pigeons and the pigeons are in the sky and they're coming back and the boy is scouring the sky for their return. We can look at the image and we can figure out what he's doing. He's looking up into the sky. We know that this verb refers to the sky. I scoured the sky. And that's exactly what he's doing. He's looking up into the sky. Try to think about what it might mean. I scoured the sky for their return. So scoured, we're digging a little deeper, is a verb which means to search carefully for something. I scoured the sky for their return means I searched carefully for their return. That makes perfect sense because the boy is doing that. He's searching the sky very carefully for the return of the pigeons. To scour something is to search carefully. Okay, great! That's a really good starting point. And we're going to come across that word. It's really useful now you know what it means. The next word is dawned. My turn, your turn. Dawned. Dawned. Let's see if we can do that again. We can unpick this word and figure out exactly what it means. The race day dawned. This is how I found the word in the text and I plucked it out the text and here it is. The race day dawned. Now, let's see if we can figure out what type of word this is. We have options. Verb, noun, adverb, adjective. The race day dawned. Now a noun is a person, place, or thing. An adverb describes a verb. An adjective describes a noun and then a verb is a doing or a being word. What's this? The race day dawned. Here's the image. The boy sitting in the window by Mr. Evans, looking out waiting. The race day dawned. Dawned is a verb. So we're going to use that to help figure out exactly what it means. The race day dawned. When I look at this word a bit closer, I can see there's a word in a word. This is a really useful strategy for figuring out what something means. Sometimes the images surrounding the page are really useful. Sometimes they're less useful. In this instance, the images don't tell us an awful lot. So I'm going to look at the word itself and I found a word inside the word, which is dawn. Now, dawn is a noun. Dawn is what happens at the beginning of the day when the sun comes up. That's referred to as dawn, the start of the day when the sun comes up. So if I were to say, "The race day dawned," which is obviously linked to the word dawn, I wonder what that could mean. I'd like you to pause the video now and have a think. Okay. So we have this word, dawned, which we know is a verb. It has the ed past tense suffix at the end there, dawned, which means it's in past tense. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take that off so we can investigate the verb in its purest form. Dawn. To dawn is a verb which means to begin or approach. Now, confusingly, it's also a noun. So this happens often. We have nouns and verbs sounding the same or being very closely linked. Dawn is the point of the day when the sun is rising. To dawn is a verb which means to begin or approach just like at the beginning of the day when the sun rises. So you can see why they're linked. One has come from the other. The race day dawned means the race day is beginning or the race day is approaching. So it's about to begin. Okay, we're in a really good place now. A really good position to read the rest of the text. Everyday Mr. Evans grew a little weaker. By racing season he couldn't leave his bed. So I put the race rings on the pigeons legs and took them to the station. I scoured the sky for their return and clocked them in. Mr. Evans' bedroom wall was papered with their winnings, but not one for Re del Cielo, my King of the Sky. "He's got the wings for distance," Mr. Evans breathed. "Here's the race he's waited for." He handed me the entry form. King of the Sky would go to Rome by train, then race back a thousand miles and more. I smoothed his feathers, looked into his eye and put him in the basket for the journey. A part of me was going with him. I wasn't sure it would come back. The race day dawned. A storm blew up. Remember, you can pause the video if you want to look at any of these in more detail. Lightning, wind, and rain. And the King of the Sky flying across the mountains. I waited for two whole days and nights, but the pigeon with the milk-white head did not return. Again, please feel free to pause at any point. I sat beside my friend's bed and I told him that perhaps the sunlight and the fountains and the vanilla smell of ice cream from a thousand grannies' shops had made our pigeon want to stay. "No!" Said Mr. Evans. "That will only tell him this is not where you belong." The old man's eyes blazed fire. "Get out there, boy," He said, "And welcome him!" The rain had stopped. I ran out to the loft and squinted up into the clouds. A speck, a blob, a bird, a pigeon with a milk-white head. A hero and a champion. 1200 miles he'd flown from somewhere far away he'd never been. Steered North and West finding his direction from the sun and the force that guides a compass needle. Flown until he saw the shape of humpback hills, the lines of little houses and the chimneys, heard the clanking towels, smelled the soup and coal dust. Flown down into the arms of the smiling, crying boy. The boy who knew at last that he was home. And again we have these beautiful end pages beautifully illustrated. And that's the end of the story. Fantastic, what a text. Wow! We are lucky to be studying this! So, let's summarise what we've read so far. I'd like you to have a think. What do you think? Do you think King of the Sky, Re del Cielo, is a good name for the bird and why? Now we're going to look in a bit more detail at that name because obviously we have King of the Sky, which is obviously English and quite recognisable. And then we have Re del Cielo which is in another language, which we're going to explore in another lesson. Do you think it's a good name for this particular bird? Why? Pause the video and have a think. Okay. How do you think it should end? Are you pleased with how the story ended? If you were the author, how would you have ended it? That's my next question for you. Pause the video and have a think. Okay. I'm pleased with how this story ended. I thought it was a really nice ending. I think it was very good at proving a point about what home means. And I think the fact that the pigeon came back kind of helped teach the boy a few important lessons and helped him feel a bit more at home and a bit more comfortable with where he was and where he came from, which I think is important. Well done in today's lesson. You've done a fantastic job. Today, we've recapped, done some pre-vocabulary. We've read the text and we have summarised. So, well done for all of your hard work. You completed the lesson!

To engage with a text

To engage with a text

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UnitEnglish / King of the Sky by Nicola Davies

English