The Hundred Decker Bus Resources and Activities
Happily some schools are making use of The Hundred Decker Bus in their teaching.
Here are some ideas for how you can use the book in classrooms and at home. If you come up with any other great wheezes, please let me know and I'll add them here.
Counting to 100 (obviously!)
There really are 100 decks, although there are some 'half decks' thrown in to confuse. To help you count, deck 50 was clearly a milestone for the passengers as they built a funfair on it. Deck 30 is mentioned in the story so it can be fun to find it on the finished bus. And how many decks did the bus have when it was 'taller than the tallest skyscraper'?
Build your own bus
We've had some fun with this. Get hold of some flattish boxes. You can use cereal packets if you intend to do only a few; otherwise you need something more robust (we used these cake boxes). Make a basic bus from one or two of the boxes — this will be your base.
Give one to each child and let them make their own deck. They can be super-creative as long as it's spelled out that there is no point in decorating the top or bottom of the box, just the sides.
Then as a finale, pile them up. First of all see if you can get it to stay up. Secondly see if you can reach the ceiling!
Of course, there is no reason why you couldn't do this as drawings on paper instead.
Spot the characters
Aside from the main characters, there are several obvious and not-so-obvious recurring characters in the book. Very many occur twice, but here are some who appear more often (not including the cover):
- Woman with orange hair and half moon specs (9 times)
- Boy with a football (8 times, once without his football)
- White-bearded man in a cap, sometimes with a dog (8 times)
- Man wearing square glasses and a green/yellow bobble hat (7 times)
- Man in an orange turban (6 times)
- Clown (5 times)
- Boy always eating a banana (4 times)
- Lady knitting a scarf that gets longer and longer (4 times)
There are many others... Can you find the 2 places a rabbit appears? Also, all the characters playing in the band on deck 100 appear somewhere earlier in the book.
Map
Take the map spread of the book as your starting point to draw a route for your own bus. As in the story, children can add landmarks of any sort, and then incorporate them into the design of your own bus. Half the class could be in charge of the map while the other half build the bus accordingly.
Deck 77
First of all, find deck 77! You'll see that it is empty. Children could think of a story to explain why the passengers put nothing on that deck. Or maybe they had something there and it disappeared...
So the deck needs filling. But with what?
Downloadable resources
Here are some A4 JPEGs you can download and use as much as you like.
Hundred Decker Bus colouring in sheet |
Hundred Decker Bus colouring in sheet |
Catch the Cuddle find-the-thing activity sheet |