Emily Mackenzie Learning Resources

Emily MacKenzie learning resources

Fun, creative activities inspired by Wanted: Ralfy Rabbit, Book Burglar and Stanley the Amazing Knitting Cat

CFE Levels Early and 1 (ages 5-7)

About these resources

These resources are full of cross-curricular activity suggestions to help you explore Wanted: Ralfy Rabbit, Book Burglar and Stanley the Amazing Knitting Cat with your students. Adapt and use as you see fit!

About Emily MacKenzie

Emily MacKenzie is an exciting new face in picture books! Her debut, Wanted: Ralfy Rabbit, Book Burglar, was published in 2015 to instant acclaim, and was shortlisted for the Scottish Children’s Book Awards and the Independent Bookshop Week Award. This was followed up by Stanley the Amazing Knitting Cat, a delightful story about putting friends first.

Activities for Wanted: Ralfy Rabbit, Book Burglar!

Create your own library check out desk Exa 0-12a, LIT 0-01b/LIT 0-11b, MNU 0-02a, MNU 1-03a, LIT 1-28a

Ralfy eventually discovers the library, where he can choose any book he wants! Create a makeshift library check out desk and give the children the opportunity to role play as librarians and customers. The customers should be thinking about what information they can give the librarian to help them find a book they will like (they could tell them some books that they already like, or tell them what kind of books they enjoy). The librarians, in turn, should be thinking about what information they need to give the customers (when to return the books, how many books they can borrow, what kind of books their customers might like, etc).

Numeracy can be included in the activity – children can be encouraged to think about how many days a loan period could be, and what day of the week a book would need to be returned on if the loan period was (for example) 5 days.

Older pupils can write little check out cards with the name of the book and the return date on them. They could also write recommendation bookmarks or bookshop-style recommendations cards (see the next activity).

Create ‘Ralfy recommends’ bookmarks or signs LIT 1-11a, Exa 1-03a, Eng 1-19a

Pupils can design Ralfy-shaped bookmarks to go inside books in the school library, with a short review of the book to recommend it to others. They could also create bookshop-style recommendation cards to sellotape onto shelves.

List making Lit 0-11b, MNU 0-02a, MNU 0-03a, MNU 0-20a

Ralfy loves to make lists of books. Why not try making some lists with your pupils? They can come up with a list of five books they’d like to read: have them recommend or bring in their favourite books. Ask your local library if they can supply you with books for this activity. Count the books and identify where you can see numbers throughout the stories. Why not pay a visit to your local library and help your pupils find some of the books on their lists?

Learning about remorse, making amends and forgiveness HWB 0-01a, HWB 0-02a, HWB 0-04a

Discuss the following with your pupils:

What is your favourite possession? Why do you treasure it so much? How would you feel if someone took it without asking?
Why was Ralfy wrong to take other people’s books without asking? What should he have done if he wanted to read their books?
Do you like giving things to people? Do you think you would enjoy loaning or giving things to your friends if they asked? What kind of things would you like to give?
Why do you think Arthur forgave Ralfy? Do you think it’s true that everyone makes mistakes sometimes?
Arthur didn’t forgive Ralfy straight away. If someone does something wrong to you, how do you feel at first? Do your feelings change later?
Arthur didn’t just forgive Ralfy – he also helped him. If someone did something wrong to you, how could you help them not to do it again? For instance, if someone got angry and said something mean but said sorry to you later, what could they do to stop themselves saying mean things?

Ralfy has learned a lot about friendship and making amends. To follow up on this discussion, you could do some role play with pupils. Ask them to create some puppets: they could create Ralfy and Arthur puppets. Suggest some scenarios to the pupils and ask them to finish the story and act out their scenarios. Here are some examples:

Arthur has had an argument with someone else, and takes it out on Ralfy by saying something mean. What should Ralfy and Arthur do?
Arthur asks Ralfy to come over and read books. Ralfy says yes but then forgets. How can Ralfy make amends?

Grow some carrots SCN 0-03a

Carrots are a relatively easy vegetable to grow, and you can ask your pupils to take charge of digging and planting them, as well as watering them regularly. They take around a maximum of 16 weeks before they are ready to harvest.

The Royal Horticultural Society has some good advice here:

The height of criminality MNU 1-11a, MTH 1-21a

The book’s front cover shows Ralfy in front of a height chart, stretching to just beyond 75 cm. Ask your pupils to create a height chart and plot Ralfy’s approximate height on it. After this, get them to measure each other’s height and record it on the chart. Get them to record class heights in a chart or graph.

They can then practise subtraction skills by calculating how much taller they are than Ralfy. You can get them to calculate their height differences to other animals too!

Some songs and rhymes Exa 0-16a

If you want to build songs and rhymes into your work around the book, here are a few great selections to get you started:

Did You Ever See a Bunny:

Little Peter Rabbit, with missing words for children to fill in the gaps:

Books are Fun (Barney the Purple Dinosaur):

Library Song:

If you and your class loved Wanted: Ralfy Rabbit, Book Burglar Lit 0-11a

Check out our list of books about characters who love reading:

Activities for Stanley the Amazing Knitting Cat

Make a gift for someone Lit 0-02a, Lit 0-09a, Exa 0-02a

Stanley makes woolly gifts for all his friends. Ask your pupils if they’ve ever given a gift to someone. How did they feel when they gave the gift? Explain that it can feel really good to give someone a present, and that everyone in the class is going to make a present for someone else.

Get pupils into pairs and ask them to tell each other about one thing that makes them happy. This could be a sport, hobby or simply spending time with friends or family. It could also be an object: a favourite toy, for example.

Ask each pupil to draw a picture that they think the other person will like. For example, it could be a picture of them taking part in their favourite pastime. Get the pupils to take home their presents.

Woolly good fun Tch 0-12a, Lit 0-31a

Stanley and his pals love wool, and this material can give you a great opportunity to explore both technologies and storytelling.

Ask your pupils to imagine a world made entirely of wool. What would people and animals look like? Use some pipe cleaners and wool to make the characters shown in this activity: The activity describes the characters as ‘monsters’ but you don’t have to badge them as such: instead, ask pupils what and who their characters are, and get them to come up with stories about them. There are several different ways you could approach this:

Come up with a class story and create puppet shows by attaching the wool characters to sticks. Your pupils could invite other classes to come and watch their show, or even broadcast their shows to pupils in another school using GLOW or Skype.

Use a storybuilding approach. Storybuilding sessions are a great way to build skills in structuring stories and help pupils use their imaginations. They are especially good for children who haven’t developed the ability to write with a pen or pencil yet.

Gather pupils in small groups if you can – around six pupils is good – and start them off by giving them a stimulus. Usually this stimulus should be a character to feature in your story, so you can use one of the wool characters in this case. Ask the pupils open questions to engage their imagination and get the story started: for instance, who is this character? What are they doing today? How are they feeling?

After this, ask more questions to get ideas from the pupils to help you build the story. As they give you ideas, you can select the ones which are most useful to move the story forward. You should be looking for a problem or surprise for the character to move things forward. Ask questions to tease this out: how is the character feeling today? Why are they feeling like that? How can they change the way they feel? For instance, they may be bored with nothing to do, and the pupils can make up an adventure for them to go on.

As the story develops, you need to create some record of it to help pupils keep track of the plot: you can note down developments on the board, use props to signify plot points, or ask pupils to act sections out.

It’s quite important to create an ending that everyone is happy with. How is the conflict of the story resolved? For instance, if the character was bored at the beginning, has that feeling completely changed by the end of the story?

These storybuilding ideas are taken from The Little Book of Storybuilding:

Here are some other woolly tasks:

Your pupils can make some woolly pom poms – this video shows you a really easy method:

This fun activity asks pupils to create a window display with wool:

Write a poem from the balloon basket Lit 1-31a

Stanley and his friends are undoubtedly going to travel far and wide in their new balloon. What do your pupils think they’ll see? If they haven’t flown before, this video from a hot air balloon will give them some idea of what things look like from up in the air:

Ask pupils where they think Stanley and his friends will go in the balloon. If they name a city in the world, you could ask them what they might see in that city, or you could suggest that Stanley and his friends might fly over your pupils’ home town.

Ask pupils to write down their ideas of things that Stanley and his friends might see. After this, they are going to imagine they are Stanley, and write a short poem describing what they can see.

Make sure you show the class a good few descriptive poems before you try any writing. You can find some nice examples of poems written by pupils at this website: Show the pupils a few of the poems, and ask them to say what their favourite is. Use this as an opportunity to discuss what makes the poems effective. Do the poems use words that make it easier for the pupils to imagine what the things being described are like, for instance?

Now, get the pupils to think about using descriptive language. You can approach this in a number of ways:

For younger pupils, you can bring in a bag of random objects and ask pupils to dip their hands into the bag and feel the objects. Can they use words to describe what the object feels like? Can they and the other pupils guess what the object might be, based on the description? Explain to pupils that they can use descriptive words like these in poems, to help the reader get a better picture of what they are describing.

Write a very basic poem of your own for pupils, without any descriptive words in it. Ask the pupils for suggestions as to how you could describe things better.

After this, you may want to use some kind of framework for poetry writing. You could ask the pupils to compose similes, saying what all the things look like from the air, or simply describe what they see line by line.

You may prefer to write the poem as a whole class collaboration – whatever suits the needs of your pupils better.

Circle time discussion topics Lit 0-02a, Lit 0-09a, HWB 0-01a

The book presents some valuable discussion points for pupils.

Stanley obviously loves his friends and is very kind and generous with his creations. However, when he is faced with the choice of stealing wool from them or not entering the competition, he chooses the wrong thing, before realising his mistake later.

Discuss the following questions with your pupils:

If you were one of Stanley’s friends, how would you have felt when Stanley took your woolly clothes away?
Do you think it was wrong for Stanley to do that? Why?
Sometimes we don’t get to do everything we want. How do you think Stanley would have felt if he hadn’t been able to enter the competition? When we feel disappointed or sad, what can we do to help ourselves feel better?

Also, Stanley is different from other cats, who like to do things we normally associate with cats. This provides a nice opportunity to talk about differences between people.

Discuss the following questions with your pupils:

Does everyone like to do the same things? Do you think it would be good if everyone liked doing the same things?
How can we help our friends enjoy the things they like to do?
Have you ever wanted to take up a new hobby or sport? What do you think you should do if you want to try something new?

Encourage pupils to ask each other about the things they like to do. You could then go ahead and do the present making activity on page 4!

If you and your class loved Stanley the Amazing Knitting Cat Lit 0-11a

You might enjoy the books on our book list about friendship: