English KS3 Other Resources

Bug Muldoon – book study

This book is part of the Rollercoasters series by Oxford University Press which is aimed at KS3 level (11-14 year olds) and each book comes with a free online resource pack.

Inspired by various home ed families on Insta, we thought we’d try reading a book out loud together. The girls became independent readers very early on (they were both about 5/6yrs old) and have always preferred to read alone at night. We’ve therefore not read books together for years but I was starting to wonder if we were missing out on something…

Why did we choose Bug Muldoon?

We chose Bug Muldoon as it was something a bit different from the usual books the girls would read and I was really impressed with the free resources that came with it. I read the entire book on my own in one sitting and found it had really lovely characters, a good plot, plenty of humour, good suspense writing techniques and varied sentence structures.

In addition, the accompanying resources were incredibly detailed, covered a huge array of topics and activities and gave us scope to explore a lot of things together. I felt there was plenty we could analyse and talk about.

Resources available

We followed the free scheme of works in the Teacher’s Pack on the OUP website and read the book over 12 sessions across 3 weeks. As the story developed and got more exciting towards the end, we did more than one session in a day as the girls wanted to find out what happened next!

There are full lesson plans and at least one worksheet to print off for each of the twelve sessions. There are further activities in the Reading Guide (which needs to be purchased separately).

I found two copies of the book and the separate Reading Guide on Amazon as used books. 

Approach to using the resources

First off, I read the entire book on my own. It didn’t take long as it’s a short book and it’s easy to read.

I then printed off the entire Teacher’s Pack (putting 2 pages to one A4 page and printing double-sided) and set about annotating and adapting the lessons to match our needs/likes/learning style.

These lessons are designed for schools but all the activities can be adapted to suit home edders.

I read through each lesson plan and crossed out any activities I didn’t want us to do and chose which of the worksheets I wanted to print off.  I did this for all 12 sessions before starting it with the girls so we were always good to go whenever we decided to pick the book up. It took me a long afternoon to get everything planned (and that included time arguing with the printer) so I’d say the resources aren’t time-intensive at all to get your head around and sort.

Topics and activities included in this book study

As you can see from this list, the book and resources cover a vast array of topics:

Book synopsis

This is taken from the OUP website:

Our opinion

Having completed this book study when the girls were 12 and 10.5, we’d say the story is suitable for ages 9 upwards but some of the resources are more suited for 11+ to get the most out of them.

Both girls rated the book 9 out of 10. They said it was fun to read and they loved Shaky Jake, one of the characters. As the book progressed, they were keen to read on which resulted in us doing three sessions spread out over one day. I’d say that’s a sign it was a good book!

We really enjoyed reading our first book together in many years. I’d definitely look at using another Rollercoasters book from OUP. Our next step after Bug Muldoon was to read Skellig by David Almond together: this was a Twinkl scheme of works. We all rated that 10 out of 10!