Funnybones

Product Information

Little gets bored with the quiet life on the dark, dark hill. So he decides to go to the city before he gets worried about Big and Dog getting lost. "There are too many skeletons" says the Big Skeleton in the city and even the underground has them.

Create a character profile for each of the skeletons. What are their real names? What are their personalities like? What are their favourite things? The use of repetitive language and songs further add to the stories features and add a great amount of fun and laughter when the story is read aloud. Both the adults reading the text and children can join in with this. I feel that it cannot only be used as a literacy focus, but the story itself has scientific features. Children are able to extend their biological knowledge of the structure of the human skeleton. This will assist in enlarging their language vocabulary. The Funnybones decide to put on a show and Cat keeps getting told to go away each time she was carrying a poster that advertised the show. The 2 ports of call were Mr. Bonehead at the Pet Shop followed by Dr. Bones at the Skeleton Surgery of the dark, dark hospital.

About ELHQ

It is a particularly dark, dark night tonight, and Big and Little keep bumping into each other, making them fall to pieces, and there is only one thing to do: send in Dr. Bones, who does a great job of patching them up to stop them from bumping in the night.

This is a great book to be read with young children at story time. Children can join in whilst the teacher is reading the book out loud of them. When using this book in placement in Year 2, all children joined in and sang along. They all enjoyed singing as there were a lot of rhyming and repetition words. There are 206 bones in an adult human body. How many different calculations can you think of with the answer of 206?

Using our Resources

Mr. Bonehead: The skeleton owner of the pet shop (who wore a bigger hat called a flat cap with a pencil and an apron), who Big and Little took Dog into with a view to swapping him for another pet etc. in the episode "The Pet Shop" and everything else in other episodes. This book is about three skeletons, the big skeleton, the little skeleton and the dog skeleton. They all lived on a dark dark hill, in a dark dark house. On the television series of Funnybones, six episodes have the same title based on the storybooks, but three had different titles of storybooks based on the same episode, and the other three never had a storybook as source material. The final episode of the television series, however, was based on the first storybook of Funnybones, while the first episode was based on the second storybook called "The Pet Shop". All twelve episodes were originally shown on BBC One and repeated on BBC Two as part of the Children's BBC strand, as it was known before 1999, on Tuesdays at 4:00pm.

Watch the animated series and explain which you prefer. There are lots of episodes available online. Here is one of them:

The book has a lot of emphasis on the word ‘dark’, such as dark dark street...dark dark house...the effect of this is that children are able to remember this and they also get a sense of the way it has been used for effect. Dog: The pet dog of the skeleton brothers who loved bones, digging holes, and found everything that the skeleton brothers need.

Dr. Bones: The skeleton doctor (who wore a doctor's coat and glasses with a first aid kit, a stethoscope and a leg tapping hammer) who helped Big and Little to stop them from bumping in the night and everything else etc. in the episode "Bumps in the Night" and everything else in other episodes. What do you think? They had a lot of fun, but one picture shows the three skeletons running away from a skeleton of a crocodile ... The English voices were provided by popular comedian Griff Rhys Jones, who also sang the theme song as the Moon Man whilst the original Welsh voices were provided by Ray Gravel, who also sang the theme song as the Moon Man.Funnybones (Welsh: Y Sgerbyde) is a Welsh-British children's television comedy series, which originally aired on S4C in Wales, and on BBC One with BBC Two showing repeats elsewhere in the United Kingdom from 29 September to 15 December 1992. The pictures in the story are all based in dark places. Investigate light and different light sources. On a dark, dark hill, there was a dark, dark town. In the dark, dark town, there was a dark, dark street. On the dark, dark street, there was a dark, dark house. In the dark, dark house, there was a dark, dark staircase. Down the dark, dark staircase, there was a dark, dark cellar. And in the dark, dark cellar, some skeletons lived." Moon Man: The Crescent-moon-shaped character who was always the narrator in each episode. Unlike other characters, he was also not a skeleton. The Funnybones books are a must for children just starting to learn to read - these funny skeletons are definitely not the scary sort!