This Mary Poppins lesson plans resource pack includes teaching ideas, extension activities and worksheets based around the original Mary Poppins book by PL Travers.

So, if your class love the films, you can now share the magic of the original stories with them.

Mary Poppins lesson plans objectives

• Think carefully and discuss characters in a text, considering events from different points of view and finding evidence for their opinions
• Infer characters’ feelings, thoughts and motives from their speech and actions, justifying their inferences with evidence
• Discuss their ideas, listening carefully to others and taking turns in conversation
• Explore aspects of classic fiction from our literary heritage
• Write reports, using events and description in a rich narrative for inspiration
• Appreciate the conventions around telling jokes, and prepare and perform a joke

Starter activity

Bring an old bag into class full of interesting objects and get children to help you unpack it. Ask them who could own a bag like this, and whether the bag reminds them of a story character.

Ask children if they know about Mary Poppins. They will probably tell you that they’ve seen the 1964 film and/or the 2018 version, giving you the chance to talk about the way books inspire films and the changes that occur from page to screen.

Now, before you begin the main lesson, make sure you’ve read and discussed the first chapter in the original Mary Poppins book (in which Mary Poppins arrives on the East Wind at Number 17, Cherry Tree Lane).

Which characters are introduced in this chapter and what do we learn about them? Explain that the events in this book happened a long time ago, when people lived differently.

What did you notice in the story that tells you this? Talk about the way some people had nurses and nannies to look after their children, as well as servants to look after them.

Ask your class who looks after them when they’re not at school. What do their families and other people do to care for them? How is Mary Poppins caring for Jane, Michael and the twins? What do you think it would be like to have Mary Poppins looking after you?

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