Serendipitous Stories

In The Animals of Farthing Wood, the main protagonist, Fox, is parted from all his friends and nearly drowns when he gets trapped in some debris floating down the river. Despite drifting far away from his pals, he meets Vixen, and muses to himself that out of something bad, good has arisen, thus transforming his view on how bad the bad thing actually was.

We talked quite a bit about this today; how every cloud has a silver lining, and how serendipity can occur, especially as our day entailed acting out scenes from the Animals of Farthing Wood and trying to put ourselves in the shoes/paws of the animals..

Ferdy made a list of all the perilous things that the group of animals have had to encounter in the story so far, and we went to Calke Abbey to search for them. 

Cautiously crossing the trunk road, we found the treacherous swimming pool, the army land where the woodland creatures had to flee from the fire, the barn in which they took shelter and then had to tunnel their way out of, the thorns upon which some the of new baby animals were impaled by the Butcher Bird (yes, The Animals of Farthing Wood does not shy away from the gory details of the animal kingdom, and yes, one of our new words today was impale) and Vixen's den. Luckily, we did not have to experience the horrors of the fox hunt, chapter 22 which we read whilst we were there; if I were not already against fox hunting, I would be after reading this chapter.

We also managed some Animals of Farthing Wood column addition and subtraction, (eg Farthing Wood used to have 987 trees growing in it. The bulldozers have cut down 768 trees and taken them away. How many trees are there left growing in Farthing Wood?) and Gil was also happy because I'd made him some worksheets.

On the way to and from Calke, we started listening to the Ikabog, and when we got home we watched the wonderful Amantha Edmead's rendition of the Wolf and the Seven Kids, which we get sent weekly by the Story Museum in Oxford (where we were supposed to be going for Ferdy's birthday next week). Ferdy and Gil then wrote ten minutes of facts that they could remember from the story, although Ferdy doesn't know it's ten minutes as he hates being timed! This was a good idea from his teacher and a great way to get them both to consider the most pertinent bits of a story and learn to summarise. Ferdy has a tendency to tell the whole story almost word for word when asked to explain what it's about, stubbornly insisting on reaching the end..

It was a rainy, cold and grey day and I hadn't been expecting much but according to Gil, this was his best flexi days ever. I'm inclined to agree that it was definitely one of our better ones; thanks to that little injection of serendipity we finished the day with rosy cheeks, stories in our heads and a renewed spring in our paws.