Key Stage 1 Reading & Grammar Materials

** ‘The October Adventure’ and Accompanying Resources**

Super Spies 1 – The October Adventure is a detective/spy story, composed of twelve short chapters, that is suitable for children reading purple band books and above. The vocabulary can be read with motivating fluency and comprehension.

The October Adventure is about four siblings called Spring, Darcy, Tom and Joel Friend, who are invited to become spies/detectives for a mysterious Agency. The Friends live in a small, non-specific town. Their first mission is to recover a stolen quad bike. Readers will love the idea of being part of a gang of children solving mysteries.

In the book there are several sections where Darcy uses the equipment in her spy kit. Kids enjoy reading about spying devices and, through her success in using her kit, Darcy gains confidence and becomes an accomplished agent. She will provide inspiration to all those children out there who are a little lacking in confidence!

The characters in The October Adventure come from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds to reflect the readers’ world. Elements of the story are very familiar to children – homework, the park, the supermarket. (Essentially the book is realistic, although, at times, improbable!) But they are combined in such a way that they encourage children to believe that they themselves could also be caught up in their own exciting adventure.

Accompanying Resources
The October Adventure is an ideal resource for use in weekly intervention sessions. After reading a chapter with a group, you can explain and discuss the accompanying grammar exercise. Each chapter is followed by a short set of questions on one of the topics in the Key Stage 1 SPaG test. The questions are related to the contents of the chapter.