🐒 1. The lost monkey

Listen. Do not write anything while the book is being read.

Monkey Puzzle, by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Axel Scheffler (London: Macmillan Children's Books).

A little monkey has lost his mum. A butterfly offers to help. The butterfly takes him to an elephant, a snake, a spider, a parrot, a frog and a bat, and every single time she has got it wrong.

✍️ Now the book has finished. Write your answers in, on your own.

1. The butterfly is never lazy and never careless. She listens to every description and finds an animal that fits it. So why does she get it wrong six times in a row?

2. Write down one thing the monkey knew but never said out loud.

3. Write down one thing the butterfly believed but never said out loud.

4. Whose mistake is it: the monkey's, the butterfly's, or nobody's? Give a reason.

5. At what point could the search have been fixed, and what would have had to be said?

🧩 2. What went wrong?

We will hear your answers before you read on.

The butterfly does everything a careful thinker is supposed to do. She gathers evidence, she reasons from it, and she acts on the conclusion. "Bigger than me, with a tail that coils around trees" genuinely does describe a snake. Her reasoning is not the problem.

The problem sits underneath the reasoning. The butterfly's own children are caterpillars, and caterpillars look nothing like butterflies. So she is working from an assumption she has never once examined: that babies do not resemble their parents. The monkey never thinks to say "she looks like me", because to a monkey that is too obvious to be worth saying.

Two of them, the same evidence, and a single unspoken belief that neither notices. That is enough to send the search off in the wrong direction six times over.

✍️ Write here: describe a time you were confidently wrong about something because of an assumption you did not know you were making. Two or three sentences.

🤔 3. What is knowledge?