Running Wild

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Whether or not she understood I did not know, but to my great relief, I felt her gathering her strength underneath me and then breaking into a lumbering shuffle up the hill and into the forest. The truth was that I was dreading everything about going home, and what’s more I knew Mum felt the same, which was why it was a complete mystery to me that she was suddenly so anxious to leave. 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.

This is a great resource about a great man and our year 6 very much enjoyed learning about Michael Morpurgo. I could feel it shifting sideways off Oona’s back, so that some of the cushions were already waterlogged. I’d be gazing out at the countryside rushing by, at cows and horses scattering away over the fields, at clouds of starlings whirling in the wind, at a formation of geese flying high into the evening sun. I tried whispering gently to her, as I’d seen the mahout doing back down on the beach, but it proved to be no use at all.It wasn’t as if there wasn’t fruit in abundance all around me in the jungle, but none of it was fruit I recognised, and anyway I couldn’t get at it. He won the 1995 Whitbread Children's Book Award for The Wreck of the Zanzibar, the 1996 Nestle Smarties Book Prize for The Butterfly Lion, and the 2000 Children's Book Award for Kensuke's Kingdom. Some days I would wake up in the morning thinking and believing it had all been a nightmare, that Dad would be having his breakfast in the kitchen as usual when I got downstairs, that he’d be walking me to school as usual.

On Elephant Appreciation Day, Children’s Touring Partnership announced the first UK Tour of Running Wild by Michael Morpurgo in an adaptation by Samuel Adamson, beginning at Chichester Festival Theatre on 10 February 2017. With his wife Clare, he set up the charity Farms for City Children, which offers children and teachers from inner-city primary schools the chance to live and work in the countryside for a week on one of the charity’s three farms in Devon, Gloucestershire and Wales.

The noel deals with issues including death of a parent, natural disasters, deforestation and poaching, and pupils have always become very engaged with the story - even some of my most reluctant readers! Every day of our stay had been brilliant, except that is for a surprise visit to the doctor for some sort of injection that Mum said was important.