We’re going to read Flyaway Boy again at my book club! We’ve read and enjoyed When the World Went Dark by Jane de Suza twice, and I look forward to reading this one with another batch too. It’s perfect to discuss so many things – form, narrative voice, imagination, possibility … The list of ideas below just about scratches the surface of everything we can do with the book!
Boxes
Flyaway Boy opens with a bit about boxes. What neat little boxes do we fit into? Are there any labels we give ourselves, or any labels people give us? Especially as many of the children join my book club batch after batch, I’d love to know if there are any labels they give one another. What labels do they associate with the others at the book club?
It’s an interesting introspective activity to undertake even without the context of the book because sometimes, we create labels for ourselves and try to live up to them, even if we’ve actually outgrown the boxes to which those labels belong.
What do you make up?
Continuing with the idea of introspection, I would love for the children to write a little about what they make up. We make up stories all the time. Stories about being rich and famous. Stories about being top players, top students, anything. This is likely to be something private, and I won’t push the children to share what they’ve written, but journalling our ideas is always an eye-opener.
Collective Nouns
What collective nouns do we know? Nana Know-It-All makes up a poem featuring a murder of crows, a gulp of swallows, a kettle of hawks and a shrewdness of apes. Together, we’ll do a fun, funny activity that introduces odd collective nouns.
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