The Iron Man

We have begun reading 'The Iron Man' by Ted Hughes


The Iron Man fell off the cliff and broke into pieces. However, he was able to put himself together again; apart from his ear, which had been found by seagulls and put in their nest. We think he was looking for his missing ear when he walked down, down, down into the sea again and disappeared, with his eyes flashing.

In today's episode, the Iron Man came back. Hogarth spotted him back on the edge of the cliff when he was doing some fishing. Of course he was scared and he ran back home. He told his father what he had seen.

Now, if you told your father that you had seen an Iron Man as big as a house with feet the size of a single bed, what would he have said? But Hogarth's father believed him! He believed him because he had seen the evidence.....

The evidence was a tractor in the yard that had been BITTEN in half! There were teeth marks to prove it. There was other evidence too; chewed up diggers and bulldozers, a half-eaten bicycle wheel and a piece of a mud-guard.

All the farmers from round about decided to make a trap for the Iron Man. And this is what they did.....They dug a huge hole, as deep as three trees with steep sides. They covered it with branches and straw and then earth, so that it looked just like a ploughed field. On the far side of the trap they placed the bait. This was a rusty (but tasty looking) lorry. They hoped the Iron Man would be tricked and fall into the trap on his way to eat the bait, but so far, he has not reappeared.....and we have to wait for the next exciting episode to find out what happens next.
But in the meantime, we got thinking about the things that the Iron Man might have enjoyed for his supper. We know that he likes things made from IRON and STEEL (which are both metal).

In art we made our own Iron Man. We sketched him on paper first. Then we looked at the different shapes we had drawn; we saw squares, rectangles, semi-circles. We cut out the shapes we wanted to use for the body parts from metal foil and used other metal things for his eyes, ears and hands. We used paper clips, thumb tacks and staples and we even provided him with tasty metal snacks, in case he got hungry. But the best fun of all was searching through Momo's bucket of screws, nails and rivets to see what else we could find that might be useful.......................

Take a look at the process in our slide-show.