Sharing a Shell

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Look at the use of punctuation in the story. When have full stops, commas, questions marks, exclamation marks (etc.) been used and why?

The cover gave a great starting discussion with the pupils, stimulating their imagination and comprehension. The "bristleworm" was given many names before we started the book. Violent cannibalistic adventure featuring three rootless wanderers drifting from one temporary abode to another, constantly menaced by vast predatory monsters.

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The book explores friendships and relationships, of how the characters can co-operate with each other to make a lovely place to live even though they are not the same species. This can be expanded upon to explore the different communities children live in and how/if they work to make a nice environment to live in. Sharing a Shell also highlights the importance of each character, as without each other they are lonely and the shell will be dirty, at risk and unable to move around. Children can then expand on this to see what jobs there are within the UK and the World over and how they assist the people who live there. Create some puppets of the crab, anemone and bristle worm. Could you use these to perform the story to an audience? I really enjoy writing verse, even though it can be fiendishly difficult. I used to memorise poems as a child and it means a lot to me when parents tell me their child can recite one of my books.

My real breakthrough was THE GRUFFALO, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately - he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow - but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes. Former Children's Laureate Julia Donaldson is basically the goddess of wordsmithery, as far as I can tell. She's most famous for creating The Gruffalo with Axel Scheffler but has also written about a billion Oxford Learning Tree early readers and a number of lovely books with illustrator Lydia Monks. With her 2004 picture book Sharing a Shell British children's author Julia Donaldson has a hermit crab busily searching on the beach and in tidal pools for a new home as his/her older abode is no longer big enough. And upon finding a new and suitably spacious shell in which to live, a sea anemone comes along and asks to share the hermit crab's new place of residence with the promise to protect the crab (and of course also the shell) from predators, and then a passing bristleworm also asks, offering to keep the shell clean ad tidy in return (and with the crab quite readily agreeing to basically having two permanent roommates). But after a period of time a bigger shell is once again needed, and while at first the hermit carb, sea anemone and bristleworm squabble amongst themselves and end up going their separate ways, at the end of Sharing a Shell, the bristleworm finds a new and larger shell, and crab, sea anemone and bristleworm once again move in together. I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him).Look on a map and find the location of your nearest beach. How would you get there? How long would the journey take? Make a video to retell the story. Can you include pictures, narration, music and sound effects? Watch this example for inspiration: