Box It Up activity using warning story Elf Road by Pie Corbett

This short warning story by Pie Corbett called Elf Road is brilliant as a box-it-up activity for identifying the themes within the story. As well as including the short story text (which is freely available on the internet) I have included a worksheet I made for children to 'box up' the story. One side is for writing the underlying generic patterns within the story (e.g. Main Character finds a magic portal and enters) while on the other side children have to identify the actual examples of this specific to the Elf Road story (e.g. Billy finds a wooden door in Elf Road and goes through.) These are differentiated on three levels so that HAPs have to fill in the entire grid on both sides (I suggest after modelling a few examples first), the MAPs have to identify some of the underlying patterns and some of the specific details, and LAPs only have to find the specific examples with all of the underlying patterns being provided. Also included is a blank grid and (scroll this down) the 'answers' to the whole grid for teacher reference. It also provides a super clear framework from which to progress to adding a third column on the right for 'new ideas' - i.e. children collectively or individually vary the story details to include their own ideas following the underlying theme (e.g. my lovely class decided that main character Daisy would fall into a sewage pipe and end up in a new world...). I taught this with Y3/4 but I think could also be useful with upper KS2.