Sharing a Shell

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How is glitter used in the illustrations? Think about the different materials that artists can use and try to use them in different ways. With her 2004 picture book Sharing a Shell British children's author Julia Donaldson has a hermit crab busily searching on the beach and in tidal pools for a new home as his/her older abode is no longer big enough. And upon finding a new and suitably spacious shell in which to live, a sea anemone comes along and asks to share the hermit crab's new place of residence with the promise to protect the crab (and of course also the shell) from predators, and then a passing bristleworm also asks, offering to keep the shell clean ad tidy in return (and with the crab quite readily agreeing to basically having two permanent roommates). But after a period of time a bigger shell is once again needed, and while at first the hermit carb, sea anemone and bristleworm squabble amongst themselves and end up going their separate ways, at the end of Sharing a Shell, the bristleworm finds a new and larger shell, and crab, sea anemone and bristleworm once again move in together.

My real breakthrough was THE GRUFFALO, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately - he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow - but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes. You could begin by playing a circle time game to open discussion. Pass a shell around the circle. When a child is holding the shell, it's their turn to speak. Can the children say what they liked best about the story? Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta.Make a video to retell the story. Can you include pictures, narration, music and sound effects? Watch this example for inspiration:

Choose one of the animals in the story and find out about it. Can you write a report about where it lives, what it eats, how it might defend itself etc.? Look on a map and find the location of your nearest beach. How would you get there? How long would the journey take? I also continued to write “grown-up” songs and perform them in folk clubs and on the radio, and have recently released two CDs of these songs. I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him). Retell the story in the form of a playscript, adding speech and stage directions where appropriate.There are many reasons that storytelling and storybooks are used so effectively in the classroom. Visual learners appreciate the mental pictures that storytelling evokes. Auditory learners focus on the words and the storyteller's voice. Kinesthetic learners remember the emotional connections and feelings from the story. The book explores friendships and relationships, of how the characters can co-operate with each other to make a lovely place to live even though they are not the same species. This can be expanded upon to explore the different communities children live in and how/if they work to make a nice environment to live in. Sharing a Shell also highlights the importance of each character, as without each other they are lonely and the shell will be dirty, at risk and unable to move around. Children can then expand on this to see what jobs there are within the UK and the World over and how they assist the people who live there.