From the Bookshelf of University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education, Primary PGCE 2019-20 …

[close] Mr Gumpy’s Outing is quite a simple tale – a man owns a boat, gets a variety of visitors, tells each of them not to mess around with the most recent visitor, they do indeed mess around, and they fall in the water – but it’s a useful tale, but in terms of ‘actions have consequences’ and in terms of effectively sequencing stories. I’ve taught with it in Reception, and the only real downside is the difficulty in segmenting some of the words in the children’s own writing (‘squabbled’), but equally this is a good challenge for some of the higher attainers! Children can recount the story, add in their own characters (and consider what they might do to mess around), and perhaps consider different characters’ perspectives in speech bubbles. Ultimately, this is a great story in that it’s very formulaic, but not monotonous.