Meerkat Mail

Product Information

Or, if you would like to provide a little more challenge, you could also change the main character to another animal. Meerkat Mail is a lovely children's short story by Emily Gravett that follows Sunny the Meerkat as he goes off on his travels. The endpapers even include family portraits of Sunny and his relatives just like you'd find in a photo album.

We discover how different all of his relatives’ lives are through the pop-out postcards from each place he visits. This encourages the children to think more deeply and engage with the story which should help them when they come to do the following tasks. Immerse the children in visual images and film clips if there is no animal sanctuary near to you and then role-play a wild animal expert for the children to ‘hot-seat’. Although not all the characters in the novel are developed with the same level of personality as Sunny, children still feel engaged in the lives of them as they fulfil different roles within their habitat/ pack.It’s about a Meerkat named Sunny who decides he isn’t happy at home and wants to travel to see where his other relatives live. The other key link is to Geography - learning about the Kalahari Desert, and, in one class, they used that as a starting-off point to compare their local area to different countries which I think was a National Curriculum objective.

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Another brilliant picture book from the creator of the incredible WOLVES, winner of the 2005 Kate Greenaway Medal. Start with teaching an oral report on meerkats to the class, using a text map to support the process. Pete the badger likes to keep everything neat and tidy, but his over-zealous cleaning begins to have a damaging impact on the forest.

I don't think it lends itself well to libraries or small children who will simply tear the postcards out of the book. He journeys through rain and shine and light and dark, reporting back to his family via a series of postcards. The illustrations are cute and show the emotions on Sunny’s face pretty clearly about what he thinks of them.This made the children think more deeply about the story and gave them an opportunity to use their imagination to elaborate on what happened.

Sorry to hear you are disappointed, this pack contains 13 resources and is very popular so is well worth the money and time saved if you were planning and preparing all of it yourself. When we had found all of the key features we started to discuss what we could put in our own postcards to Sunny. As he endures too much rain, too much dark, and slimy food, he decides that there really is no place like home, and back he goes, grateful for all the annoyances (and comfort) his family provides. We turned the narrative poem (The Spider and the Fly) into a playscript, by setting it out correctly and adding detailed stage directions. He sends postcards home to his family and at first they are full of enthusiasm, but as the trip goes on and he has to stay with family who stay up all night, to those that live in swamps, to those who eat eggs off farms, he decides that maybe his own family is just right for him!But from the watery world of the Marsh Mongoose to the nocturnal lifestyle of the Malagasy Mongoose, Sunny just doesn't fit in. It's a story about a meerkat who gets tired of where he lives and travels to all his relatives homes and sends back postcards. The illustrations convey as much as the text, and children can be helped to understand events, feelings, character details and motivations by close reading of both. Although, other picture books focus around telling stories like this with animals, the way that Gravett presents the narrative through postcards aids in making this story unique and exciting. We learn interesting facts about the different animals, such as that Hornbills warn mongooses of danger, so they don’t have guard-duty, like the meerkats.