The Butterfly Lion: Michael Morpurgo

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Morpurgo added: “Storymakers and storytellers like Barrie, and like all the previous winners of this award, have given us the hope and faith children need, we need, to keep flying, have sustained us through dark and troubled times, have banished doubt. To touch the lives of children, to witness their listening and reading silence, is reward enough in itself. This is simply the icing on the cake.” The old lady says that ‘true stories do not always end just as we would wish them to’. Do you prefer to hear the truth or something made up that keeps you happy? That was when the shot rang out. The hyenas bolted into the long grass and were gone. When Bertie turned around, he saw his mother in her night gown, rifle in hand, running towards him down the hill. He had never seen her run before. Between them, they gathered up the mud-matted cub and brought him home." While I wouldn't say this is an exciting book is covers a lot of exciting issues and keeps readers with a variety of interest hooked.

The Butterfly Lion transports the reader/listener to two very different continents and several different stages in time. It takes you on a rich journey of adventure,loneliness,loss,sadness,hope,love,friendship,determination and joy. Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.11 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000222 Openlibrary_edition Sitting high up in a tree, or looking out of his window, Bertie watches the beautiful elephants, giraffes and zebras come down to the water hole. But it's the lions, Bertie likes best of all. And when, one morning, he sees a baby lion cub trying to escape from some hungry hyenas, Bertie rushes out to rescue it. Emotion/Emoji Word Bank: Create a word bank of emotion-related words (e.g., joyful, worried, excited) on the board, linking them to corresponding emojis. Ask children to rate the books they read based on their emotions.The protagonist of the story is a young boy who is well characterised by Morpurgo allowing the reader to get on board and feel the emotions of the character. However, he is carefully ambiguous enough to allow a wide verity of readers to identify directly with him. Michael Morpurgo appeared on the map for me after I first saw the movie and then read the book War Horse. Eventually, I came across this gem of an edition.

At the start of the book, the boy is at a boarding school in Wiltshire. Write a diary entry from his point of view, explaining how he feels about being there. Make a list of the animals named in the book. Can you use a Venn diagram or Carroll diagram to sort them into different groups?

Bertie escapes from his school and meets Millie, and the two become fast friends, flying kites together. He tells Millie all about his life in South Africa, and his white lion cub. When the pair leave school, they continue to write until war breaks out, and a letter arrives from Bertie informing Millie that he has joined the army.

Find out about the use of animals in circuses and write a balanced argument showing the arguments for and against this practice. This book, The Butterfly Lion, is such a wonderful story. It's about a boy called Bertie. He lives with his parents, on a remote farm in the wild countryside of South Africa.

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Michael's books have been translated into many languages including Chinese, Bulgarian and Hungarian, Hebrew and Japanese. He travels all over the UK and abroad talking to people of all ages at literary festivals, telling his stories and encouraging them to tell theirs. In one, a modern boarding school, the children could compare their improved experiences to Bertie’s hardships in a spartan bygone setting. In another, the vivid descriptions of Africa transformed grey windswept days of an urban Autumn term, and in the third, the descriptions of school food and chilblains fascinated the children and engaged their parents and grandparents who would delight in telling of their own memories.