I love The Shopping Basket by John Burningham. It’s a real favourite in our class with the children. Basically, a mum asks her son to go into town and buy a list of shopping items for her, but on the way back he meets some animals who try to take his shopping. I will warn you that it is a bit of a shocker in terms of the aggression in the story between the boy and the animals! However, I found that the children I read this book to brought up this point themselves and this gave us an opportunity to talk about bullying together.
I’ve used this book for maths – we count the objects the boy has and how many he has left after he encounters the animals – and also for drama. For drama I brought in some props for the children, a basket from the op shop and laminated copies of the shopping items. Each child had a role to play as the boy or the animals and we repeated the experience so everyone had a chance to have a role. This also gave more opportunities to include mathematics.
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