Handa's Surprise

We are working on the big book 'Handa's Surprise' at present. It is one of teacher's favourite books (and ours too now!!). It is about a girl called Handa, who decides to go to visit her friend, Akeyo, in another village.  Handa carefully places 7 delicious fruits in a basket to bring to Akeyo. However, on her way she encounters (unbeknownst to herself!!!) 7 cheeky animals who each steal a fruit from her basket. Handa would have arrived to Akeyo's village with nothing ,only luckily and in the nick of time, a goat knocks against a tangerine tree and a load of tangerines fall into Handa's basket!! When Handa finally reaches Akeyo's village she is really surprised to find the basket full of tangerines and not full of the 7 delicious fruits she had carefully placed in the basket earlier. Luckily for Handa (and Akeyo too!!) that tangerines are actually Akeyo's favourite fruit!!!
We have been discussing the story in detail and naming our favourite parts and characters. We learned that every story has a beginning, a middle and an end and we picked out and wrote about the beginning, middle and end in Handa's Surprise. We drew our favourite parts of the story and are practising re-telling the story in our own words. We listed the animals in the order that they come in the story and we matched the animal to the fruit that they took in sequence.