The Graveyard Book - 20 Whole Class Reading Lessons

A series of 20 ready-to-teach complete Powerpoint or Google Slides lessons about the award winning book The Graveyard Book.

This resource contains 10 Powerpoints (or Google Slides) each comprising of 2 lessons. My slides will guide you from start to finish through this wonderfully engaging book that the children will love! The slides are intended to be taught to the whole class using the increasingly popular whole class reading approach.

Each lesson usually takes the similar format:
Starter/ opening task on mini whiteboards
Pre-teach vocabulary that will come up in the reading
read the book with the class - all page numbers provided (I like to use a mixture of Teacher reading, partner reading, choral reading, and echo reading)
A short input/ modelling before the task
Task slide - a range of activities including the following: annotated drawings, themed comprehension questions, debates and challenges.

Note: To maintain variety, slides sometimes slightly differ from this format.

The series of lessons is appropriate for Year 4 to Year 6 children but can easily be adapted.

All lessons are linked to the English Reading National Curriculum and all focus on the content domains from the reading SATS papers. Many tasks in the lessons expose children to similar questions that they might come across in the Reading SATS test. All are set in the context of The Graveyard Book and children really enjoy the short tasks. All tasks are set on the powerpoint for children to view and work from - there is only one worksheet included. I found that this reduces the need for lots paper handouts and makes the lessons run even more smoothly.

Learning objectives include: predicting, summarising, retrieving information, inference, finding evidence to justify an answer as well as reading fluently with expression and intonation.

Some of the tasks include differentiation. I use a green, yellow, red chilli system, where children start on either green or yellow and then can move on to the more challenging red chilli.

Please be aware that the 20 lessons focus in on certain points in the book and some of the reading of the book would need to be read outside of the lesson time. I have included a slide for each lesson that clearly states which pages should be read before the next lesson. This helps keep the pace of reading up and maintains the children’s interest.

The children in my class loved practising their reading skills using The Graveyard Book and my slides. I’m sure other children will also!