Dasher - Christmas literacy ideas

As Christmas approaches the chances are you’re looking for a lovely book to share with your class and some teaching ideas to go along with it.

One book I’ve fallen in love with this Christmas is Dasher by Matt Tavares. It’s a delightful story about one brave little Doe who runs away from the circus to find her true home at the North Pole. It is very much the origin story of the family of reindeer who pull Santa’s sleigh every Christmas Eve.

It’s a popular book. It’s a good story told well, and children very much connect with the heroine, Dasher. It clearly has appeal across the primary age-range, but I’ve opted to outline teaching ideas for children in key stage 2. My full set of teaching ideas can be found in our Dasher Starting Points set, but to give you a flavour of what’s inside, here are a few things you could do with this lovely Christmas book.

Create a book trailer

There is a lovely book trailer created by Walker Books that I’ve included in the Starting Points set. It’s a great way to introduce the book to the children as it sets the scene without giving away the story. You could get the children to make their own book trailers using i-movie or a similar app. This is a great way for them to summarise the story as they’ll need to pick out the main points of the narrative.

Explore powerful verbs

Dasher is a short story and every word earns its part in the narrative. This is part achieved through some very strong verb choices. I’ve planned for children to study these and to use them in their own writing based on the book.

 Dealing with dialogue

There is some great dialogue in the story. Children often find the punctuation of dialogue tricky – mostly about which punctuation marks to use where depending on whether the reporting clause comes before or after the spoken words. I’ve picked out opportunities for children to practise using the punctuation needed to show dialogue but also for them to role play the words spoken to help them figure out which words are spoken and which words are a direction for the reader.  I’ve also included a handy classroom poster that illustrates the rules for punctuating direct speech.

Write an information text

In my planning ideas, I’ve suggested children could research and write about the North Star. It features prominently in this story and opens up some interesting discussions about the curvature of the Earth, how this impacts on the position of the star in the sky, and also how the North Start has been used by travellers for millennia.

I’ve included many more ideas in the Dancer Starting Points pack including work on vocabulary, adding suffixes and writing fronted adverbials. You can download our Starting Points pack here.

 If you enjoyed this article, check out these others on the Christmas theme.