UG: Boy Genius of the Stone Age and His Search for Soft Trousers

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Why doesn’t Ug’s boat float on the water? Can you find out about materials that float? Could you carry out an experiment to find out how much weight different materials will hold while floating? Introduce your students to Raymond Briggs' 'Ug: Boy Genius of The Stone Age' with our range of lovely illustrated resources and teaching aids. Ug and his parents live in the Stone Age. And that means stone blankets, stone-cold food, an even colder cave and, worst of all, hard stone trousers! Come along with Ug as he tries to show his family a softer way of life by showing them a few changes to make him and his family more comfortable in their Stone Age home. From balls to boats and his search for soft trousers, this is a wonderful story to share with your young students.

Some of the illustrations in the story don’t have any captions or speech bubbles. Can you think of some for them? Look at other comic strips and discuss their features (e.g. caption boxes, speech / thought bubbles). How are they different from other types of text? Ug tries to invent lots of new objects. Can you find out about famous inventors and the things that they invented? How do these objects affect our lives today? Can you identify any new words used in the text (e.g. neanderthal, carcase, anachronism). Can you find out what these words mean? Could you make a glossary to explain their definitions?

Make some instructions to teach Ug’s family about things that might help them (e.g. writing / cooking / catching food / making boats / finding new materials to use).

Ug’s mum tells him to go and play with stones. Can you make up some (safe) games that could be played with stones? Imagine that you swapped lives with Ug. Could you write a story about your experiences in the Stone Age? What might Ug think of modern times? I did not realise how long this book actually was. It took us the best part of 40 minutes but it was the first day and EVERYTHING took longer. The children learned LOADS from this. What a great read! We will be reading it for the next two weeks to gain ideas on our 'failed inventions' story. SO yeah this is going on my 'currently reading' status. Sorry.Another unique, amusing and simply weird book by the inestimable Raymond Briggs. The basic plot follows caveboy ("why do we live in caves, mum? couldn't we build something outside?") Ug, who tries to invent all sorts of things, despite the general bafflement, contempt, and even anger of literally everyone else in his world. It's unusual for Briggs to focus on a smart character but not at all unusual for him to satirize ignorance, which he does here with rather less tragic effect than in many of his other books (e.g. , Gentleman Jim)--not that we have a happy ending here, either, as Ug's idea of inventing soft pants (rather than the stone ones everyone wears--it is the Stone Age, after all) comes a cropper when he isn't quite bright enough to figure out sewing. One might read this in different ways: smartness isn't good enough; brilliance cannot thrive when surrounded by indifference or antagonism; genius can be squelched by bad parenting; failure is the human lot, etc. None of these are particularly comforting "messages" for a kid's book, but I'm okay with that.

Ug’s mum doesn’t like the exciting new words that Ug uses (e.g. nice and terrific). Can you think of other amazing words that Ug’s mum wouldn’t like to hear? As it explains in the text, people in the stone age didn’t have minutes or hours. How would you explain this concept to them?The humour is enhanced by Briggs's use of footnotes to subvert whatever dubious plausibility his narrative has (after all, stone pants, stone blankets--this is a silly world). Several times, Briggs uses footnotes to point out anachronisms in his text, and then subverts even this quasi-serious device by turning the notes themselves into jokes and silly commentaries. (e.g. a note on the use of the word "minutes" suggests that the word minute is an anachronism, as it was unknown in the Stone Age, but of course, there were billions and billions of them anyway.)