Grandad's Island: Benji Davies

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I was reading to the class and had reached the part of the story where Grandad tells Syd that he is thinking of staying on the island. They were excited that there was a big metal door in Grandad’s attic and eager to predict and draw where the door might lead to. We use VIPERS, created by The Literacy Shed, to help develop our sessions and I felt that I had implemented this structure effectively.

What was especially lovely was the children’s engagement with the book – their investment in the characters, their lines of enquiries and, quite frankly, the pleasure they seemed to derive from exploring each page of this stunningly crafted narrative. To read the artist’s picture is to mobilise our memories and our experience of the visible world and to test his image through tentative projections…It is not the ‘innocent eye’, however, that can achieve this match but only the inquiring mind that knows how to probe the ambiguities of vision. I like to think that both of them are somewhere on an island faraway, where the waterfalls cascade and a large chimpanzee serves them tea, or maybe even a ‘Footballer’s Dinner’. Secondly, the children really enjoyed the story, which created a shared excitement and buzz within the classroom. Delving into a book, spending time with the characters and enjoying exploring a picture book is my favourite thing to do with a class, so I was more than happy to spend a morning doing so.I’ve just stumbled across this as a trainee about to plan and teach my first series of lessons on “Grandad’s Island”.

Grandad Eagleton taught me to laugh, collected conkers for us and told us not to worry about anything (“If worrying did me any good, I’d do it all the time! One boy was beside himself to discover that he had already seen the animals helping to build the shelter…in Grandad’s attic! I was sad to see my mum crying and in pain and life, for a while, certainly seemed bleaker and darker.

But having explored the book alongside my class, reading it aloud and seeing the children make their own connections with the characters and story, I had finally made a connection of my own to the themes of loss, grief and saying goodbye, which are subtly weaved throughout the story.