The Ever-Changing Earth is a beautiful book, in both language and illustration. Kate Greenaway award-winning author Grahame Baker-Smith takes the reader on a magical journey through the incredible story of Earth’s evolution. He introduces us to its extinct creatures, buried oceans, and frozen layers along the way.
This story is great to use for a KS1 book topic, and can take you way beyond literacy activities. This PDF contains inspiring art and design, geography, science and music activities based on the book.
The language used here is poetic and carefully chosen to create a mood of mystery and awe – perfect for employing as a base for poetry and descriptive writing activities. The extraordinary creatures and cosmic activity shown throughout are ideal for sparking the imagination in connection with art projects.
This is a book that covers a surprising amount of ground, with, importantly, plenty to captivate the imaginations of a whole class.
Introducing The Ever Changing Earth
After sharing the book with your class, talk about the following points:
- If dinosaurs shared the planet with people today, how do you think we would get along? Would we have to make sure all the dinosaurs lived in their own area – far away from people?
- The book talks about creatures evolving; does anyone know what is meant by the term evolution?
- Can the class think of any ways they could evolve that would make their life easier? Ask for some suggestions. Maybe they could have one really long arm for reaching objects on high shelves, or super-bouncy kangaroo legs, making it really quick to bounce to school. Encourage the children to be as imaginative as they can.
Karen Hart is an independent drama teacher, author and freelance writer.
