The Ugly Five

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Yet for better or worse, these five have earned themselves an unfortunate place in the official Ugly Five listing. In reality, warthogs are quite intelligent. They sleep underground at night, yet they don’t dig their own burrows. Rather, they steal them from other animals, such as aardvarks. Not a kind move, but a clever one. The plains of the savannah are home to some of the world’s most majestic creatures, but this is not a book about them. This is a book about the other animals that don’t always get the limelight; the dumpy, the lumpy and the smelly. When five less than pretty animals get together they all decide that they are the ugliest creatures around. Can anyone love a face as hideous as theirs? Oliver thought it was mysterious. Sonny pondered the message of the book and told me: “At the end of the book they weren’t really ugly at all - they were lovely.” The Ugly Five’ (2017) is a short, lovely, simple but effective and affecting story – the latest from the accomplished team of writer Julia Donaldson and Axel Sheffler – who provides the usual and wonderful illustrations to accompany the compelling rhyming words of Donaldson.

This time the story is about some animals in the Savannah who are, shall we say? Less than attractive. They’re an unusual looking bird, bald-headed with wisps of hair, perhaps worthy of their addition to the ugly five. They have a wingspan of 2.6 meters and a height of 1.5 meters. Interesting maribou stork fact: they have hollow leg and feet bones, an adaptation to help them fly Edward listened carefully and wisely pronounced: “It’s good that they don’t care what they look like, but I prefer The Gruffalo.”My real breakthrough was THE GRUFFALO, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately - he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow - but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes.

A new book by Julia Donaldson is always a thrilling event for a primary-school librarian. Her books - the best-known of which is The Gruffalo - are guaranteed crowd pleasers, easy and fun to read aloud. They are often used by our key stage 1 teachers as the basis for a term’s project work. She is also one of those rare picture-book authors whose name the children recognise, and they are genuinely excited when she publishes a new book. Due to the rhyming nature of the story it is a great read aloud book. The repetition allows the children to join in with any repeated refrains and encourages them to notice and predict the rhyming words at the end of each sentence. Therefore could be used with Nursery children or lower Key Stage 1. Their newest effort is a celebration of the animals in Africa, but not the ones children usually come to love. This is a book about the "others"; the funny-looking animals that many forget. Taking a warm-hearted approach, Donaldson draws our attention to "The Ugly Five": the wildebeest, the warthog, the hyena, the vulture and the Marabou stork.Funnily enough, I find it harder to write not in verse, though I feel I am now getting the hang of it! My novel THE GIANTS AND THE JONESES is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic PRINCESS MIRROR-BELLE who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old. I have just finished writing a novel for teenagers. Marabous are scavengers eating anything from termites, flamingoes, and small birds and mammals to human refuse and dead elephants. They also feed on carcasses with other scavengers such as vultures and hyenas. Curiously, warthogs are omnivorous, meaning they can eat both vegetation and meat. Their diet consists mostly of grass, bulbs, and roots, but they will occasionally scavenge for meat scraps. Who would have thought? An Unsightly Summary of The Ugly 5

Think about how the different animals move. Could you try to recreate these movements? Could you put together a dance or a performance to show these movements? Fortunately for them, they got a friendlier portrayal in The Lion King. Most people think of them as the loveable, slightly daft ‘Pumbaa’.Which, in Swahili, actually means ‘to be absentminded, careless, foolish, ignorant, lazy, stupid, and negligent’. So it is with a heavy heart that I have to report that The Ugly Five was something of a disappointment. For a school librarian, this is as close to sacrilege as you can get. Hyenas can adapt to almost any habitat and are found in grasslands, woodlands, savannas, forest edges, sub-deserts, and mountains.I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married. There are three species of hyena in the Hyaenidae family. Namely, the striped hyena, brown hyena, and spotted hyena. The lesser-known aardwolf is an additional member in the same family. I got the idea for this book when I was on a safari in South Africa. We had just spotted a herd of wildebeest. Everyone enjoyed hearing about the Marabou stork, which poos on its legs - apparently to cool itself down - and there was fascination about exactly what the meat was that the hyena and the vulture were eating. One nature-documentary watching child thought that the answer would not please the wildebeest. The reader would need to have experience of empathy and support so they could put themselves in that situation and see what it may be like to feel that you are not beautiful or wanted. The story teaches about friendships and the importance of family. It allows children to explore ‘beauty’ and how there is more than what meets the eye. However, when exploring the narrative of this story teachers may need to be wary of the past experiences that the children may have had before digging deeper into the teachings the story could hold.

Warthogs have a wide distribution across sub-Saharan Africa, with a preference for open woodland and savannahs, and are not endangered. I've included some templates again this week. I'm not expecting you to do them like this, but I know some of you like a worksheet. Hope this helps some of you. It is easy to overlook smaller creatures while on a safari as we are normally on the lookout for the famous Big Five game animals, but this isn’t Africa’s only famous collection of animals to be seen. Allow us to introduce to you Africa’s less glamorous animals, the warthog, hyena, marabou stork, vulture, and the wildebeest, also, unfortunately, known as The Ugly Five. Although these animals aren’t eye-catching, they all have something unique and fascinating to offer. The term ‘Ugly 5’ refers to a group of the five ‘ugliest’ animals in Africa that you can spot on a safari. It’s a rather brutal classification, and in reality, all animals are beautiful in their own way.The hyena family includes four species: the Striped, the Brown and the Spotted hyena, and the Aardwolf.