Ready Steady Write - Bobby Shaftoe

Ready Steady Write – Bobby Shaftoe (20.5.22)

This term, our ‘Ready Steady, Write’ day centred around the nursery rhyme ‘Bobby Shaftoe’, linking with the current Class 1 topic ‘Land Ahoy’. After learning and singing the rhyme, the children discussed what they had learned about Bobby Shaftoe. They then imagined what might have become of him after he went to sea…

Perhaps, his ship was attacked by pirates and to save his life, he became one of them. Perhaps he travelled the world collecting treasures from all sorts of places. Linking with the work both classes have been doing in learning about different biomes, the children spent some time researching the different sorts of places Bobby Shaftoe might have travelled to and what he might have collected there: a pet parrot from the rainforest, a lucky scarab amulet from a pyramid in the Egyptian desert, a wooden leg from a temperate forest, a treasure chest from a shipwreck in the depths of the ocean, some ice from the tundra for his rum and coke and a bison’s hook from the savannah to make a pirate’s hook hand! The children then spent some time working in mixed age groups to research the plants and animals of the different biomes and make some ‘porthole’ pictures looking out on them from Bobby Shaftoe’s ship.

The Class One children wrote letters from Bobby Shaftoe to his sweetheart, confessing about his new pirate profession and describing some of the things he had seen, while the Key Stage Two children wrote pages from an guidebook that Bobby might have carried on the ship, to tell him about each of the biomes he visited. The children worked with great enthusiasm on these projects and produced some lovely writing, which they enjoyed reading to one another at the end of the afternoon.