Metamorphosis - Year 7

As my Year 7 class are sure to have noticed this year, some of the greatest and most influential tales ever told are about people being metamorphosed into animals. We largely have Ovid to thank for this. We have the tale of Arachne being turned into a spider by the jealous Minerva, the tale of King Midas with his unfortunate donkey-ears and, though we did not get the chance to cover it in class, we also have the tale of poor Actaeon - who was turned into a deer and killed for no other reason than that he accidentally walked in on the goddess Diana standing naked in the forest.

Greek Myths were one of the very few things on the agenda when Shakespeare was at school, so it is hardly surprising that many of his fantastic plays draw influence from Greek Myth. We have the tragic untimely death of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' reworked and repackaged as 'Romeo and Juliet'. We see the tragic rape of Philomel (and the ensuing gruesome eating of children) make its way into the lamentable tragedy of 'Titus Andronicus', and we see the Trojan War as the setting for 'Troilus and Cressida.

Shakespeare's most famous nod toward Greek myth however, must surely be 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. The play ends with a comedy-staging of 'Pyramus and Thisbe', but that is not where the similarities with Greek Myth end. Shakespeare also borrows the idea of 'metamorphosis' from the Greeks when he has Puck transform Bottom so that he has the head of an ass. He wakes up in the forest to find, unsurprisingly, that all of his friends are scared of him and he has no idea what is going on.

In the spirit of metamorphosis, my challenge for my Year 7 class is to write a descriptive piece (no longer than one side of A4) as if they have just been transformed into an animal.

The rules are as follows:

1. Write a short descriptive piece in the 1st person as if you have woken up in the body of an animal.

2. Do not name what that animal is, but rather make the reader guess through your decriptions of the way you move, the way you see the world and the different feelings you might experience in this body.

3. Try to use a wide range of vocabulary and sentence-lengths to make your writing as entertaining as possible.

4. You may wish to use the internet to find out information about your particular animal to give you an idea of what it might be like to be that animal.

I have written a couple of example introductions to give you an idea of what I am looking for. Can you guess what each animal is?

Example 1:

The ground scraped gravely on my neck and belly. My skin grew ever-more dry and callused as I dragged myself over the floor. It took all my mind’s focus to co-ordinate my countless segments of spine to take me just an inch. I could feel myself becoming drier with every second and took the opportunity to lay in a puddle, resting the tips of my tongue in its murky coolness.

Example 2:

I tried to call out to my friends but all that came from me was a horrible screech. I shook my head, hoping to shake this horrible nightmare out of my mind, and felt a strange flap of skin on my neck wiggling from side to side. Needless to say, I was terrified, and out of instinct I tried to run but all I was able to muster was a pathetic stagger as I jutted my head backward and forward to give me momentum.