Feodora and her mother live in the snowbound woods of Russia, in a house full of food and fireplaces. Ten minutes away, in a ruined chapel, lives a pack of wolves. Feodora's mother is a wolf wilder, and Feo is a wolf wilder in training. A wolf wilder is the opposite of an animal tamer: it is a person who teaches tamed animals to fend for themselves, and to fight and to run, and to be wary of humans. When the murderous hostility of the Russian Army threatens her very existence, Feo is left with no option but to go on the run. What follows is a story of revolution and adventure, about standing up for the things you love and fighting back. And, of course, wolves.
The author:
Katherine Rundell is an award-winning children's writer and a Fellow in English Literature at All Souls College, Oxford. Her books have won, among others awards, the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award, the Boston Globe Horn Book Award in America, the Andersen Prize in Italy and Le Prix Sorcières in France. She lives mostly in London and a little in Oxford, where she works on research into the Renaissance poet John Donne and occasionally goes climbing on rooftops late at night.
Literary devices I will be practising throughout this writing journey:
- Revise key SPaG taught in Autumn Term
- Colons to mark the boundary between clauses: It’s sunny: I’m going out to play. Colons for dramatic effect.
- Semicolons to mark the boundary between clauses: It’s raining; I’m fed up
- Hyphens for compound words to avoid ambiguity: man eating shark or man-eating shark
- Personification
- Persuasive devices
- Synonyms:
- Realising that when you find a synonym, the word means something slightly different, eg,“big” and “grand”. “Grand” can mean “one thousand”, “elaborate” and “decorative”, as well as “big”.
- Antonyms to create different effects in sentences
- Antonyms: using prefixes
- Connectives to signpost and create cohesion within a text:
order of sequence, time connectives, additional ideas, space and place, contrasting, exemplification, results, to summarise
- Colon and bullet points for a list
- Repetition for effect: persuasion, suspense, emphasis
- Collective nouns
- Imperative verbs
- Modal verbs/adverbs of possibility
By the end of this unit I will be able to write…
- Persuasive Letter
- Newspaper Report
Other writing opportunities that will help me practise my skills:
- Instructions
- Prediction Writing (writing an effective ending to a story)
- Action Scene (3rd Person, past tense).