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Read The Magic Faraway Tree (2002)

The Magic Faraway Tree (2002)

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Rating
4.28 of 5 Votes: 5
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ISBN
074974801X (ISBN13: 9780749748012)
Language
English
Publisher
egmont

The Magic Faraway Tree (2002) - Plot & Excerpts

Enid Blyton’s ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ is an imaginative and enchanting book that would be great to introduce into a Key Stage 2 classroom.The book follows on from Blyton’s first book in the series ‘The Enchanted Wood.’ The story follows three siblings - Joe, Beth and Frannie - who have discovered a magical tree near their house. The children take their cousin Rick, who has come to stay, to visit this magical tree. Within this enormous tree lives very funny and peculiar characters including Silky the fairy, The Saucepan Man and Moon-Face, but the most exciting thing about the tree is that at the very top of the tree there is always a different magical land. In ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ the four children visit lands such as ‘The Land of Spells’ and ‘Topsy-Turvy Land.’ Each land is exciting and new and the children always have a fast paced adventure there.The imagination in this book is what makes it such an attractive story to children. The book is full of magic, unique characters and special make-believe lands. Every chapter is as exciting as the last as each one follows a different land the children visit. This structure makes children want to read the next chapter and it keeps the book exciting the whole way through. The fun story, along with a few illustrations and a bright cover, distract children from the fact that the book is actually very long for children, which is fantastic for developing and challenging a child’s reading ability. When a child finishes the book there is a great sense of accomplishment and self-satisfaction because, although a brilliant read, the wording and style of the book is sophisticated with a long plot, many characters, lengthy conversations and vivid descriptions.When introducing this book into a classroom a teacher would never be short of activities to use involving the story. The book could certainly be used across the curriculum, for example, in art, literacy and drama.The book would be brilliant in an art or drama session. The story would allow children to produce a really creative and unique piece of art work. The magical characters would be fun to draw or use as characters to act out. Furthermore, the description of the magical lands would be great to recreate in art by painting of drawing them, for example, the ‘Land of Topsy Turvey’ is described really well: ‘Every house was upside down, and stood on its chimney’s. The trees where upside down, their heads buried in the ground and their roots up in the air. And the people walked upside down, too!’ (19).The book would also be brilliant in literacy. There are many activities children could do involving this book, for example; ‘imagine you lived in The Land of Spells, describe what you see’; ‘write from the perspective of one of the children when discovering the Faraway Tree for the first time’; ‘Invent a new land that comes to the Faraway Tree and describe what the land looks like.’In conclusion, Enid Blyton’s book is imaginative, fun and exciting. Strong readers will be able to challenge their reading further by completing the whole book whereas weaker readers could focus on just one of the short chapters and still enjoy an exciting adventure the children have in one of the magical lands. The imaginative story opens up a range of possible tasks a teacher could use in a classroom that would suit both the higher and lower ability children.

I sat down with a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit delighted at the prospect of re-reading a childhood favourite, 'The Magic Faraway Tree'. I hadn't had chance to go back to my parents and dig it out of the cupboard so I had picked up a copy from the local library. As I smiled and opened the first page my face dropped to the floor(and my biscuit plunged into my tea). In this edition 'Dick' was now 'Rick' and 'Fanny' was now 'Frannie'. As I flicked through the pages frantically it seemed that this was just the beginning of countless changes from the original text (or at least the version I remember from the '90')in this 2007 Egmont edition. After I had recovered and brewed another tea, I decided to read it alongside a downloaded older edition copy I had found online. Although painstaking, it proved to be a very useful exercise. I was able to see how much had been changed and thus what was deemed as inappropriate in current children's literature. As a child I read countless Enid Blyton books in the 1990's and really liked her dated way of writing and actually (even as a child) found her many outrageous politically incorrect notions quite amusing. It seems that a lot has changed even since when I was growing up. The Magic Faraway Tree is the 2nd book in a quartet of books with the same characters and theme. It tells the story of a group of 4 children who go on adventures to a magical forest. In this forest is the 'Faraway Tree' where many of their friends live, such as 'Moonface' and 'Silky'. At the top of the tree is a different land which changes at regular intervals. Some of these lands are good (eg. 'The Land of Goodies') and some are not very nice (eg. 'The Land of Tempers'). It is through visits to these lands that the exciting adventures in the book are formed. I think that this is a wonderful and magical book for a child aged 7 or 8 years of age to read independently, however it could be read to a younger child at bedtime or to a class at story time.After reading it again at age 24 I would still like to believe that a magical Faraway Tree exists somewhere in a forest nearby but maybe the lands would be different... How about 'The Land of We Will Pay-off-your-Debts (For Free!)' or even better 'The Land of Free-Clothes-Shopping'? Well, I can dream can't I?

What do You think about The Magic Faraway Tree (2002)?

The book is based on the adventures of three children, Jo, Beth and Fanny who have recently moved to a house that has an enchanted wood at the bottom of the garden. Within this wood, is a tree unlike all the others, where strange people live such as a man with a face as round as a moon and a man who only wears saucepans. The tree also has another secret, at the very top, a new land appears each day where the children and their new friends get to explore each time. Likes:What is not to like with a story from Enid Blyton, especially from the first book in the series of the adventures of the faraway tree. I remember the first time I read this story, my mum gave me her old copy when I was 9. At the time (and I secretly still do) I felt that this book was the best present in the world and made me want to make up my own stories about faraway lands. I enjoy the way the story develops with the children first discovering the faraway tree and finding out that there are people living in a tree. To the different lands that visit the tree on a daily basis and the new characters/worlds that are introduced to keep the story fresh and moving along at a good pace. I really like the way Enid Blyton imagination has run wild in this story but it all fits nicely and makes sense. With all the different lands that visit the tree each day, the reader will never get bored from hearing about the three children's adventures. Age range: I would recommend the book for children that are of 9 and upwards.To be used in a classroom: For children to either read this book as part of a paired reading activity, or an activity could be created for book week, where the class reads this book and produce either their own adventure with their friends up at the top of the faraway tree in a story they had written.
—Ben Phillips

I really enjoyed reading The Enchanted Wood, The Magic Faraway Tree and The Folk of The Faraway Tree. It has funny characters like Moon-Face, Saucepan Man and Silky the Fairy. Saucepan Man is always wearing saucepans and kettles. He's a bit deaf because of his saucepans and kettles banging together. He's very funny! Moon-Face has a round face like the moon. He has a slippery-slip inside his house. Silky is a very, very, very nice fairy. Bessie and Franny move next door to an Enchanted wood, and find the Faraway Tree with its many different places.In The Magic Faraway Tree, Jo, Bessie and Franny take their cousin Rick on an adventure he'll never forget! But then the tree starts dying and nobody knows what's happening! I found these books really funny and exciting. They are fun books to read and make me laugh. These books always have magic in them!I think this book would be brilliant for lower ks2, and it will help to inspire their imagination and creative writing.
—Lori Watts

When I was a young girl in primary school out teacher used to sit us down in our reading groups and pop a basket of books on the table. Next would come a set of headphones which was attached to a tape recorder. For the next 15 minutes or so we were fully immersed in the magical world of talking trees, swimming turtles or Emperors trying to find their clothes. Next to Art, Reading was, and is, a favourite past time.Over the years there have been many authors that captured my young mind - Margaret Mahy, Dr Seuss and Roald Dahl. As I got older I became hooked on Ann M. Martin's young girls world of The Baby Sitter Club; the deliciously horrifying realm of R.L. Stine's Goosebumps and enthralled by the talented creator of Where's Wally? - also known as Where's Waldo? in America - Martin Handford. However none could measure up to my all time favourite child book writer like Enid Blyton In the pages of her books I visited fantastic realms filled with wonder, embarked on exciting quests with strange new friends and found how intoxicating it is to truly let your imagination run free. I had roped in my younger brother, the neighbors cats and our toys to help reenact my favorite scenes. I even went through a stage where everything in my room needed to have a rounded edge like the room Moonface lived in. Suffice to say my parents wouldn't indulge this particular quirk. But they allowed me to hang all manner of yellow moons and decorate as many surfaces with as much red and white material as I could lay my greedy hands on.It's because of this kind of nostalgia that I picked up this book. Twenty-eight years later I feared my adult view would warp it into some childish fantasy that best lay in the past. Admittedly for the first few chapters I bulked because of the innocence it portrays. However after a while I began to remember. The things that came to mind sparked a moment of complete and utter surrender as flashes of my childhood came to the fore. I could feel the sun on my skin while swimming in the river that ran along the edges of town; eating tart plums in the tree because we were too eager to wait for them to ripen; playing target board against the boys just prove that girls were better and watching my mum make feijoa preserves. But the one thing I remember more clearly than anything else was the milkman. He was an old man in his sixties or seventies with crazy, wire like white hair. The most impressive thing about him was his thick set of eyebrows. To my childs eye I used to think it was funny that he could lift his eyelids because the hair on his eyebrow looked too heavy. However it wasn't the so much the man that I thought of initially but this - It's for this reason that I give this a 5 star rating. The Magic Faraway Tree helped me remember a place and time where everything was new and exciting. It gave a glimpse of how it felt to walk unfettered by the concerns of the adult world. A memory where my dreams were truths and laughter had a pure meaning. I hope if you ever choose to return to your childhood classic that you too have wondrous tales that pour forth.LB
—LastBreath

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