Oxford Level 7 Stories

Red Planet
Teaching Notes Authors: Lucy Tritton and Liz Miles
Comprehension strategies Tricky words
• Comprehension strategies are taught boots, broken, buggy, called, computer, float, floor, four, good,
throughout the Teaching Notes to enable little, mountains, one, out, people, pieces, pull(ed), some, space,
pupils to understand what they are reading spaceman, spacesuit, there, want, were, what, where
in books that they can read independently.
In these Teaching Notes the following = Language comprehension
strategies are taught:
Prediction, Questioning, Clarifying, = Word recognition
Summarising

Group or guided reading

Introducing the book
(Prediction) Turn to the back cover and hide the title. Ask: What do you think the children are looking
at? Where do you think they might be?
(Clarifying) Look at the front cover and read the title together. Have the children predicted the setting
correctly?
• Look briefly through the story at the illustrations and talk about what is happening.
Strategy check
Remind the children to keep place with a finger at the beginning or end of a line.

Independent reading
• Ask children to read the story. Praise and encourage them while they read, and prompt as necessary.
Ask the children to show you the spoken words in the story and point out the speech marks.
Check that children:
• recognise the smaller words in the compound words ‘spacemen’ and ‘spacesuit’
• identify where speech marks are used to show dialogue.
Returning to the text
(Summarising) Ask: What did the children discover on the Red Planet?
(Imagining) Find ‘open’ on page 8. Ask: What is the opposite of ‘open’? How would the story have
been different if the door had been closed?
(Questioning) Turn to page 17 and ask: Do you think Chip is right to be nervous about going outside?
What dangers might there be out there?
(Prediction) Turn to page 28 and ask: What would have happened if the spacesuits had gone ‘pop’?
Ask the children to find more compound words in the story and make a list (page 5 ‘inside’, page 10
‘nobody’, page 16 ‘outside’). Check that they can recognise the smaller words.
Look at ‘filled’ on page 27 and read it. Ask the children to write the word with just one ‘l’. Ask: How
would you read this word now? What has changed? Point out how the vowel phoneme changes from
a short vowel sound to a long one.

1 © Oxford University Press 2014

 Group and independent reading activities
Draw together ideas and information from across a whole text.
(Summarising) Discuss the main settings in the story with the children.
• Ask them to close their eyes and picture the settings in their mind. Encourage them to share their images
with a partner.
• Write the settings on the board and talk about the order of them, e.g. the beginning: the garden;
the middle: the rocket and the Red Planet; the end: the rocket and the garden. Show how the order
of events is circular:
garden

rocket rocket

Red Planet
• Working in pairs, ask the children to write down the settings and what the children in the story do
and see in each. Ask: In which setting did the most things happen? Why do you think this is?
Are the children able to locate evidence in the text to support their ideas?
Select from different presentational features to suit particular writing purposes.
(Imagining) Prepare six pieces of paper cut in the shape of speech bubbles for each child.
• Ask the children to focus on the illustrations of Floppy on pages 3, 10, 15, 18, 20 and 28.
• Ask them to read the parts that say what Floppy is thinking and to write what they think he would say
in the speech bubbles.
Do the children leave out the speech marks when writing in speech bubbles. Are they able to retrieve
information from the text?
Know how to tackle unfamiliar words that are not completely decodable.
Write the characters’ names on the board: ‘Wilf’, ‘Chip’, ‘Floppy’ and ‘Nadim’.
• Say the names with the children and clap and count the syllables.
• Ask the children to look through the story and collect words with more than two syllables in them
(‘pretended’, ‘computer’, ‘adventure’, etc.).
Do the children understand that the number of letters in the word is not the same as the number
of syllables?

Speaking, listening and drama activities

Respond to presentations by commenting constructively. Work effectively in groups. Adopt appropriate
roles in small or large groups and consider alternative courses of action.
• Ask the children to suggest other things that might have happened on the Red Planet, e.g. the space
creatures showed the children the way out, or the children took the space creatures home with them.
• In groups the children take the roles of Wilf, Chip, Nadim, Floppy and the space creatures.
• Suggest they choose a different story line and work together to create a short play describing
what happens.
• Ask some groups to act out their play to the others.
• Ask the audience for constructive comments on the plays. Also encourage the audience to ask the
actors questions which they must answer in role.

2 © Oxford University Press 2014

 Consider how mood and atmosphere are created.
• Refer back to the activity on story settings (garden, rocket, planet).
• Working in groups, ask the children to think about the type of music/sounds that would create the
right mood and atmosphere in each setting, e.g. garden: birds singing; rocket: computer noises and
bleeps; planet: whistling (wind) and sounds to create tension.
• If possible give each group some musical instruments to recreate the sounds they have discussed.
Writing activities
Wordprocess short non-narrative texts.
• Ask the children to imagine that the characters, including Floppy, need to have a passport to travel
into space.
• Set up a template passport using a wordprocessing program. Model how to write the character
profile, drawing information from the story, e.g.
PASSPORT
Name: Wilf
Girl/Boy: boy
Age: 7
Hair: brown
Home: Earth
Character: likes computers, brave, has good ideas
• Ask the children to choose a character, note down information about that character and enter the
information onto the template.
• Print off so children can draw a picture of his or her character in the box.
Are children able to retrieve information from the text? Have the children presented the text effectively?

For teachers
Helping you with free eBooks, inspirational
resources, advice and support
For parents
Helping your child’s learning
with free eBooks, essential
tips and fun activities

www.oxfordowl.co.uk
3 © Oxford University Press 2014