Cat Morgan: The Pirate Cat

Author: TS Eliot
Illustrator: Arthur Robins
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Details: £6.99, 32pp, paperback
ISBN: 978-0571345823

For children in Reception, learning new words and developing their language skills is a key part of their learning across the whole curriculum. Cat Morgan: The Pirate Cat offers children a chance to explore new words and their meaning. It’s a cleverly illustrated copy of TS Eliot’s poem Cat Morgan Introduces Himself, and the language Cat Morgan speaks - fluent pirate - is very different to what children usually hear. It started many discussions about words and language in the classroom.

We had to read the story a few times to fully decode the words and try to understand their meaning. Each time we read the story, the children picked up on another word or another saying that they wanted to discuss and unpick what it meant. They particularly liked talking about Cat Morgan’s gruff manners and all the lady cats that were “dead keen on old Morgan”!

The story was a great hook to learning about poetry and why it is sometimes funny or different. It’s a great book to compare with poetry by other, more modern authors, such as Julia Donaldson. The children were able to see the links between how the stories flow and how some of the words used are a bit unusual. We wrote a poem as a class following our learning from this and the children were very proud of themselves and loved reading the poem they created.

The level of thinking and discussion that we had about this story was very deep and insightful, much more so than I thought the children were capable of. Every child in my class was able to access the story on some level, even if they just thought about the words they could hear and looked at the pictures to support their thinking.

I would highly recommend this book - it would be a great resource for teaching children about poetry from Reception to Year 3 or 4.

Francesca Peckham is an early years teacher at Netley Marsh CE Infant School, Hampshire

Pupil reviews

Amber, Shriya and Lara loved that the words were different, and though that pirates speak funny words.

Molly-May found it funny that all the girls love Morgan - and Charlie, Jack, Tristan and Billy agreed.

Robyn, Albert, Bradley and Seb loved that the Cat Morgan was a pirate, and Eva was impressed by the pirate ship. Jess, however, didn’t like the boat because it was on the sea.

Seb and Dom likes all of the sounds and funny words.

And Jed liked it when Cat Morgan went to the shop and eat a big bird. 

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If you or your class would like to write a review, please contact kate.parker@tes.com