Kensuke's Kingdom - Michael's World Trip!

This engaging and informative lesson enables students to make precise interpretations of the descriptive language used by Michael Morpurgo in his description of Michael’s trip around the world in ‘Kensuke’s Kingdom.’ They learn to define, identify, and analyse the effectiveness of a range of descriptive devices, before applying these to form their own vivid and imaginative descriptions of places.

The lesson follows a step-by-step learning journey, in which children learn through:

Understanding the scale of the journey that Michael’s family undertakes, through a fun cross-curricular task;
Defining each of the different types of descriptive devices, through completing an interactive group activity;
Reading extracts from the text in which Michael describes the different places along his trip, and identifying the language techniques used to paint an image of place in the minds of the readers;
Analysing the effectiveness of each of Morpurgo’s descriptive devices;
Creating their own description of an ‘around the world trip’, utilising appropriate and effective descriptive devices to describe at least two different stops;
Peer assessing each other’s learning attempts.
Included is:

Whole lesson PowerPoint - colourful and comprehensive;
Cards for the Card Sorting Activity;’
World Map for the opening activity;
Writing to Describe Helpsheet
Comprehensive Lesson Plan

All resources are provided in Word (for easy editing) and PDF (to ensure formatting remains fixed between different computers).
There are also opportunities for group learning, speaking and listening, peer assessment, and whole class discussion. I originally used these resources with year 4 and 5 classes, however colleagues have used them for between years 3 and 8 with some adaptations. The word documents are within the zip file.

All images are licensed for commercial use, and image rights are listed on the last page of the presentation.