KS: Upper KS2
Year Group: Year 5
Literary Theme: Power vs. Principles
Author(s): Frank Cottrell-Boyce
This is a 15-session Literary Leaf for Cosmic by Frank Cottrell-Boyce. Children begin by exploring the vocabulary used and, as the book has short chapters (with some rather brilliant titles), they are immersed very quickly into the seemingly implausible plot. There are many opportunities to retrieve information as well as infer, looking in particular at the character of Liam and how he acts when tasked with having to literally 'man up'.
We chose this book for a Literary Leaf as it appealed to our sense of 'I wonder what would happen if...?' Liam is a boy notorious for being unusually tall for his age, which has occasionally been a blessing, but is mainly a curse. When the opportunity to accompany a classmate, Florida, on a fieldtrip that is a little further away than the Lake District crops up, Liam takes the chance to be her 'father' and realises that adulting is not as easy or fun as he might have previously believed.
Space, space-travel, families, parents, exploration, rockets
