I love Michael Morpurgo. And The Butterfly Lion? I’ve had it on my shelf for ever so long, hoping to share it with more readers someday. That day is nearly here!
The Butterfly Lion is a classic. In Michael Morpurgo’s signature style, he tells a heartfelt, almost mystical story in the simplest and most magical of ways. It’s the story of love and kindness, friendship and loyalty.
Bertie is heartbroken when his beloved white lion is sent away to the circus. He knows there is no choice, but that does not make it better. He promises the lion that he will find him, somehow, someday. But Bertie’s story is a story within a story, told to a runaway boy Michael by an old lady who isn’t everything she seems to be. As we learn about the butterfly lion, we explore the joy of memory and the ways in which we remember the ones we love.
Like so many other older books, there are so many resources available online that it’s difficult to decide on just a few things to do during the creative writing component at my reading programme!
Literary Devices
A butterfly and a lion seem like such contradictory creatures.
Before we start reading the book, we will do a quick activity examining the title, writing short pieces exploring what all a butterfly lion could be. With a simple description, we can explore setting and literary devices like oxymorons, paradoxes and antitheses, moving beyond alliteration, similes and metaphors, which we’ve addressed so many times!
Show, Don't Tell
This is a ground rule of creative writing, one that writers work on all the time. Using an excerpt from The Butterfly Lion, we’ll discuss what this rule means and how we put the rule into practice. We’ll do a couple of activities around the rule too, trying to understand what difference ‘showing’ language makes.
Point of View
We read this book as a story within a story. I’d love to have the children write a diary entry from Bertie’s point of view at different points in the story – when he first sees the lion and her cub, when he is allowed to keep the cub, when he is told that he will be going to England … Diary entries and letters are a lovely way to explore perspective!
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