This week for our Word Study we are reading an extract from Granny Gibson which is short a story by New Zealand author Fleur Beale.
Our focus word combination this week is “oo” which is in words such as look, took and school. Remember there are 5 misspelt words in the last paragraph which can be used for students doing the Punctuation Activities.
Granny Gibson by Fleur Beale
Granny Gibson was a perfect granny. Neat and sweet, she had a face like a wrinkled angel and white candy-floss hair. She spoiled her twenty-seven grandchildren dreadfully and when her seven sons and seven daughters-in-law protested, she smiled and told them to mind their own business. Only she didn’t say it quite like that. For Granny Gibson had one terribly bad habit. She swore. She knew the most terrible, awful, ripe, rich swears that there had ever been invented in the world. And she made up a few of her own for good measure.
‘Swears like a trooper,’ said her seven sons.
‘She’d make a drover blush,’ said her seven daughters-in-law.
Felix, the youngest of her twenty-seven grandchildren, didn’t know what a trooper might be and he’d never met a drover, but he did know that his granny was the most fascinating granny in the whole of New Zealand. He was extremely proud of her.
He took her photo to school and showed his friends. ‘This is my granny,’ he said, ‘and man, does she know some excellent words!’
His friends took one look at the photo of his neat, sweet granny with her wrinkled angel face and her candy-floss hair and laughed at him. ‘Liar! She couldn’t even say bother without blushing.’
‘What d’you bet?’ asked Felix.
The friends were so sure they were right and Felix was wrong they happily bet a month’s pocket money each.
So Felix invited them round to his granny’s house for afternoon tea. He didn’t tell granny. He just walked in with six of his friends behind him. Granny Gibson turned round from the sink where she was making angel cakes. ‘I’m pleased to see you, Felix,’ she said. Only the way she said it made the six friends open their eyes with amazement. Not even when their fathers had hit their thumbs with hammers had they heard such rich, ripe words.
‘Told you,’ said Felix in a satisfied voice, holding out his hand for his winnings.
‘Taking money from babies, Felix?’ asked Granny Gibson, only with a few of her riper, choicer swear words thrown in.
The friends gawped and gaped.
Granny considered them. ‘Aw, they probably deserve it. Look like a bunch of…’
But the friends had had enough. They weren’t going to wait round and hear what it was that Granny Gibson thought they were a bunch of.
Felix shared half his winnings with Granny. She pushed the money away. ‘Keep it,’ she said-using suitable embellishments. ‘I swear because I like it, not to make money.’
Her sons tried to make her stop swearing. ‘It isn’t dignified.’
Granny told them it was her business and if they didn’t like it they could lump it. As for dignity, she would worry about that when she was dead.
Her daughters-in-law protested gently that she was a bad example for the children.
Granny’s eyes gleamed. ‘If I ever hear the children using any of my words they’ll hear all about it.’ At least, that was the essence of what she said. The words she actually used made her daughters-in-law blush and quake so much they had to go home and have fortifying cups of tea.
Now life would have carried on like that until Granny Gibson had sworn herself off to the grave, exceept that one day she tripped over and brook her left leg and her right arm. she lay on the floor swearing until Felix pooped in on his way home from school and found her.
He dialled 111 – a thing he’d had a yearning to do all his life – and asked for an ambulance. When it came he went with Granny to the hospital.
Up at the hospitall they X-rayed her and plastered her, their eyebrows shoting up under their hair-lines at some of the language she come out with.
‘Right,’ they eventually said to felix, ‘take her home and good luck to you.’
© Fleur Beale
To find out what happens with this story please CLICK HERE.
This week for your Kiwi Kids News Word Study Homework you must complete the following tasks.
SPELLING Activities # 1, 2, 3
PARTS OF SPEECH Activities # 1, 2, 3
PUNCTUATION Activities # 2, 3
[tabs tab1=”Word Study Overview” tab2=”Spelling Activities” tab3=”Parts of Speech” tab4=”Punctuation”]
Each week on the Kiwi Kids News website we write a Word Study article. It is a special article that can be used as a weekly tool to develop students confidence with words. Students just use the article as the foundation text for each of the activities.
We have spelling activities, grammar activities and parts of speech activities. This article include 5 misspelt words. this is done on purpose as one of the activities is for students to edit
Below are the Master Sheets which can be used to guide you in your word study.
Kiwi-Kids-News-Homework-student-sheet
Kiwi-Kids-News-Homework-Overview 2013
Your teacher may give you a certain number of activities to complete or tell you the activities they want completed this week. Remember to write both the questions and answers down in your book.
1. Using the article above list all the words that have this week’s spelling pattern.
2. List 5 other words that also have this spelling pattern.
3. Visit the TutPup site and complete one level of the spelling competition. Record your score in the back of your homework book. CLICK HERE
4. Choose 5 words from the text and write five alliterative phrases or sentences. An alliteration uses the same initial letter.
5. Select 5 words and write an antonym next to each word. An antonym is a word that means the opposite.
6. Write out 5 words that have our spelling pattern for this week. Use a blue coloured pencil for consonants and a red coloured pencil for vowels.
7. Select 5 words and next to each one write a synonym. A synonym is a word that means the same.
9. Pick 10 words from the text and write a dialogue between two characters using the selected words.
10. Choose 5 spelling words and put them into a word bank at the top of your paper. Write 3 clues relating to each word and leave a blank after the clues.
11. Choose 5 of your spelling words and then write at least two words that you can make from each.
Use the article above to answer the following questions about grammar. To remind yourself what each of the parts of
1. Find 4 nouns in the article and write them down.
2. Find 4 verbs in the article and list them.
3. Find 3 adjectives used in the article above.
4. List 3 adverbs from the article above.
5. List 3 pronouns the write has used in the article.
6. Find 3 examples of either a preposition, a conjunction or an interjection.
Noun – thing or person
pen, dog, work, music, town, Auckland, teacher, John
This is my dog. He lives in my house. We live in London.
Verb – action or state
be, have, do, like, work, sing, can, must
Kiwi Kids News is a web site. I like Kiwi Kids News. I ran down the road.
Adjective – describes a noun
a/an, the, 2, some, good, big, red, well, interesting
I have two dogs. My dogs are big. I like big dogs.
Adverb – describes a verb, adjective or adverb
quickly, silently, well, badly, very, really
My dog eats quickly. When he is very hungry, he eats really quickly.
Pronoun – replaces a noun.
I, you, he, she, some
Tara is Indian. She is beautiful.
Preposition – links a noun to another word.
to, at, after, on, but
We went to school on Monday.
Conjunction – joins clauses or sentences or words.
and, but, when
I like dogs and I like cats. I like cats and dogs. I like dogs but I don’t like cats.
Interjection – short exclamation, sometimes inserted into a sentence
oh!, ouch!, hi!, well
Ouch! That hurts! Hi! How are you? Well, I don’t know.
The final paragraph of the article above is here we focus on our punctuation and proof reading skills.
Use this final paragraph to help you complete the activities below.
1. List 3 words with capital letters and find the two words that should have capital letters.
2. List the 5 spelling mistakes that are in the final paragraph. Write the word that was in the text and then beside it put the correct spelling.
3. Join two sentences together to make one. You may need to use commas to help make the sentence true.
4. Using the entire article as a guide, write a new sentence that could go into this piece of writing. Your sentence must have a comma and speech marks.
