Mr Big by Ed Verne

Hello!

I'm linking up again with Deanna for Let's Talk about Books!

This week I am sharing a book I have used recently in my class. We needed a good book to write character descriptions as part of our assessment week. I know there are SO many good books out there with amazing characters, but I really struggled to pick one that would suit everyone. It needed to be a character who had an interesting appearance so my struggling writers could at least write about that, but one with a bit of a story and character development so my high flying writers could really delve into it.

In the end I chose this book:

It was new to me but fit the bill perfectly. Mr Big is a lonely Gorilla who is BIG on the outside but feels small on the inside because everyone is afraid of him. He sees an old piano that looks as lonely as he is one day and takes it home. His sadness makes him play beautiful music which drifts out the window for the town to hear. By the end of the short story, he is playing in a band and is surrounded by people who have got to know the real him and he is happy!

I loved how they noticed things like how his clothes changed from dull, as he didn't want to be noticed, to bright and cheerful as he became more confident!

My class loved the little speech bubbles which litter the pages and thought the expressions they used were really funny.

We wrote our character descriptions and they did a great job!

We also revisited a couple of days later and I asked them to map out the story so I could get a bit of reading assessment evidence from it (to be able to retell with some detail).

It's obviously great to talk about how we shouldn't judge people by looks alone but there are lots of other reading and writing possibilities too!

I'm heading off to see what other great books people are sharing this week at Mrs Jump's Class. You should too!