Room On A Broom Activities

Using Room On A Broom Activities in a Classroom or Home Setting

Room On A Broom Activities come from Julia Donaldson's picture book. The story follows a witch flying on her broom who picks up a cat, a dog, and a frog before being eaten by a dragon. The activities around it are basically any craft, worksheet, or game built from that story. They range from free printable PDFs on teacher sites to full scheme-of-work packs sold by educational publishers. The quality spread is wide. I spent a term running a Year 1 topic around this book after finding a free pack online. The basic idea is simple: read the story, then do the matching activities. But there are a few things that trip people up if they don't think ahead.

Room On A Broom Activities for Early Readers

The most common activities are comprehension worksheets, sequencing cards, character comparison mats, and the ever-popular broomstick craft where kids decorate paper tubes. There are also phonics-based word searches and simple maths problems dressed up with the book's characters. You can find these on sites like Twinkl, TES, Top Marks, and various teacher blogs. The actual problem I ran into was that half the printables assumed my children could already read fairly fluently. I had three EAL learners in my group who struggled with even the basic comprehension questions. The standard answer sheets didn't account for that at all. What worked instead was swapping the written comprehension for a retelling activity using the physical character puppets from the story. I made simple sock puppets for the cat, dog, and frog. The children could point and say which animal joined the witch first, second, third. It took longer to set up but every single child could participate. For the literacy element, I used a shared writing board where we built sentences together rather than individual worksheets. A couple of other details worth noting. The sequencing cards that show the order of animals joining are useful but often the illustrations are too similar between pages, making it hard for younger children to tell them apart. I laminated my own set and added small number badges to each card. That removed any guessing about which scene came when. The maths activities tend to be quite shallow. Most are simple counting exercises. If you want something that actually stretches higher attaining children, you need to modify them yourself. I turned the counting into a subtraction problem by removing animals from the broom after the dragon incident and asking how many were left at each stage.

The dragon craft is a hit but it requires cutting templates that are oddly scaled. The dragon's body comes out far too small relative to the head. I found a scaled-up version on a UK teaching forum and printed that instead. Much better proportions. If you're doing this with a large group, plan on spending about twenty minutes on printing and cutting before the children even arrive. Do it the night before. For parents doing this at home rather than in a classroom, the same materials work. The main difference is you'll probably want to skip the full scheme of work approach and pick two or three activities max per session. The book itself carries most of the value. Reading it aloud with good expression does more for engagement than any worksheet. One thing nobody mentions about these resources is that they assume a straight chronological retelling of the story. But the book has a recurring rhyme structure that repetition. The activities rarely exploit that. I had children write their own three-line rhymes matching the pattern of "Then along came a cat / 'May I come with you?' said the cat." That activity took more planning but it was the one they remembered months later.

Download links for the standard free packs are scattered across educational resource sites. TES Free Resources, Twinkl's free section, and the BBC Bitesize page for this title all have legitimate materials. Avoid the sites that require personal data beyond an email address. There's no reason to hand over a phone number for a set of colouring sheets.

What to Watch Out For

Some activity packs reference the TV series version rather than the book. The illustrations differ slightly and a few scenes are changed. If you're using this for reading comprehension aligned with the original text, make sure your materials match the book edition your children are reading. The mismatch is easy to miss until a child points out that their dog character looks nothing like the one in the story. The phonics elements within many of these packs align best with Phase 4 and 5 of the UK guidance. Don't try to force them with children still working on Phase 2 sounds. It creates frustration for no real gain. The crafts and role-play materials work fine across all early years stages regardless. If you run out of time mid-topic, the broomstick puppet activity alone covers comprehension, speech and language, and creative expression in one go. It is the single most flexible exercise in the entire available resource set. Everything else is supplemental.