Oxford Level 9 Stories
The Quest
Teaching Notes Author: Gill Howell
Comprehension strategies Tricky words
• Comprehension strategies are taught beautiful, believe, castle, charged, crystal, frightened, galloped,
throughout the Teaching Notes to enable gasped, gnome, journey, knight, meant, mirror, rescue, saucers,
pupils to understand what they are reading secret, swamp, unicorn
in books that they can read independently.
In these Teaching Notes the following = Language comprehension
strategies are taught:
Prediction, Questioning, Clarifying, Summarising = Word recognition
Group or guided reading
Introducing the book
(Prediction) Together, look at the cover and the illustration. Ask the children: Who do you think the
little man is? Can you suggest what kind of story this might be?
(Clarifying) Ask the children to read the title and explain to them what a ‘quest’ is.
Look through the book and together work out the tricky words ‘gnome’, ‘crystal’ and unfamiliar
words like ‘unicorn’ and ‘basilisk’.
Strategy check
Remind children to read with intonation and expression appropriate to the grammar and punctuation.
Independent reading
• Ask children to read the story and to find out what was special about the bell, and how they
persuaded Grimlock to give it back.
• Praise children for reading with expression and adopting a different voice when reading Wilma’s story.
(Summarising) When they have finished reading, ask the children to give a summary of the quest
story in no more than five sentences.
Check that children:
• recognise the words ‘girl’, ‘her’, and ‘burned’ all represent the vowel phoneme ‘er’
• use a range of strategies to read for meaning
• use comprehension skills to work out what is happening in the story.
Returning to the text
(Questioning) On page 10, ask: Why did Grimlock think it would be better if he appeared to Wilma as
an old woman?
(Clarifying) Say: Describe the Land of Ulm at the start of the story, the middle and the end. Ask: Why
didn’t Grimlock care that all the beauty went out of Ulm when he took the bell?
Ask the children to find pages 11, 17 and 21. Say: Find the questions beginning with the words
‘What…’, ‘Why’ and ‘How’. What are the answers?
(Questioning) On page 27, ask: Why didn’t the sound of the bell hurt Wilma and the Gnome’s ears?
(Questioning) Ask: What was the bravest thing Wilma did in the quest?
1 © Oxford University Press 2014
Group and independent reading activities
Draw together ideas from across a whole text. Explain their reactions to text, commenting on
important aspects.
• You will need a small ring; some stories that involve a wish, e.g. The Three Wishes, The Frog Prince,
Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, etc.
(Summarising) Talk about the ‘wish’ stories that you have gathered together. Ask the children to sit
in a circle. Invite one child to hold the ring and tell the group a brief summary of one of the stories or
any other ‘wish’ story they know.
• Encourage other children to offer to tell other ‘wish’ stories, but they only do so when they are
holding the ring.
• Talk about and discuss the different types of wish, e.g. stories/wishes granted by good characters,
those stories granted by bad characters; how the stories begin and how they end; who the characters
are, e.g. kings, queens, princesses or princes; animals; mythical creatures, etc.
• Ask the children to write a few sentences describing their favourite ‘wish’ story and why they like it.
Do children recognize that the stories are traditional stories.
Do the children use comparative words such as ‘prefer’, ‘better’, ‘more’?
Read high and medium frequency words independently and automatically. Compose sentences using
tense consistently (present and past).
• You will need the following word cards: ‘see’, ‘saw’, ‘go’, ‘went’, ‘is’, ‘was’, ‘take’, ‘took’, ‘begin’,
‘began’, ‘know’, ‘knew’, ‘make’, ‘made’, ‘come’, ‘came’.
Put four cards in the four corners of the room. Choose a child to go into each corner. The children
pick a card and make a sentence using that word correctly. Repeat until the cards have all been
used up.
• Write ‘present’ and ‘past’ as headings on the board. Read the cards and together decide which
heading they should go under.
• Children then attempt to write an account of what they did yesterday using four words from the
‘Past’ list.
Do the children know that the past tense is used when writing about something that has already
happened and the present tense is used when writing about something that is happening now?
Spell with increasing accuracy and confidence. Read and spell less common alternative graphemes.
Teach the children the following rhyme with appropriate actions:
Touch your ear
Touch your head
Now, dear
Touch your toes instead.
• Write ‘ear’ and ‘dear’ together, and ‘head’ and ‘instead’ together on the board.
• Say the rhyme a few more times accentuating the four key words.
• Ask for some more examples of words that sound similar.
• Explain that the ‘ea’ phoneme often has different sounds in different words.
• Tell the children they are going on a quest to find words with different ‘ea’ sounds in the storybook.
Working in pairs they should write down the words in lists according to their similar sounds: meant,
read, bear; years, hear, reached, dear, really, ears, leaves, tears, read; great, break.
• Ask them to underline the words that have the same sound as the ‘ea’ sound in the rhyme.
Do the children understand that the word ‘read’ can be pronounced in two different ways?
2 © Oxford University Press 2014
Speaking, listening and drama activities
Adopt appropriate roles in small or large groups.
You will need a picture of a bell or a real bell.
• Look at all the pictures that have Grimlock in them. Ask the children to freeze-frame statues of
Grimlock, trying to convey his different characteristics.
• Talk about the different ways Wilma managed to foil Grimlock (riding away on the unicorn; defeating
the dragon with the lemon; defeating the basilisk with the mirror; making her wish in the castle).
• Pass the bell around the group. When a child holds the bell, he/she pretends to be Grimlock and tells
the other children one of the ways in which he was ‘foiled’ by Wilma. Remind the children that they
should sound very fed up and annoyed.
Writing activities
Draw on knowledge and experience of texts in deciding and planning what and how to write.
Use planning to establish clear sections for writing.
• Show the children how to write a plan for Wilma’s story: title, opening words, main characters,
settings, the problem, the solution.
• Ask the children to help you fill in each section.
• Encourage them to write their own story plan for a different quest.
• Use an extended writing time to allow children to write their quest story.
Were children able to identify the different elements in the story and make contributions? Were they
able to use imaginative vocabulary?
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