# Topsy-turvy Land & Gulliver’s Travels

## Overview
This chapter combines a playful poem and an adventurous story to develop students’ imagination, reading comprehension, and grammar skills. "Topsy-turvy Land" presents a humorous and absurd world, while "Gulliver’s Travels" narrates the incredible experience of a man in the land of giants. The exercises focus on rhyming, sentence formation, reasons and results, comparisons, punctuation, and creative writing.

## Key Topics Covered

### 1. Poem – *Topsy-turvy Land* by H.E. Wilkinson
- A fantasy world where:
- People walk on their heads.
- Children go to school at night.
- Hats are worn on feet.
- The front-door is at the back.
- Buses travel in the sea.
- Boats run on the streets.
- You pay for things you don’t get.
- When you leave, you’re actually arriving.
- **Objective**: Stimulates imagination and teaches rhyme, rhythm, and absurdity in poetry.

### 2. Vocabulary & Word Fun
- **Rhyming Words and Pairs**:
- *pleasure, treasure, measure*
- *wear, tear; stare, where*
- *planned, canned, scanned, strand*
- *topsy-turvy, hurly-burly, curly-whirly*

- **New Words**:
- *topsy-turvy*: upside down
- *pleasure*: enjoyment
- *grand*: big or great fun

### 3. Grammar Activities
- **Sentence Formation (Jumbled Sentences)**:
- Rearranging mixed-up sentences into meaningful ones.
- **Personal Experience Prompt**:
- Students describe things going topsy-turvy in their homes.

### 4. Comprehension and Comparison Table
| Topsy-turvy Land | Our Land |
|------------------|----------|
| People walk on their heads. | People walk on their feet. |
| Buses run on the sea. | Buses run on land. |
| Hats are worn on feet. | Hats are worn on heads. |
| Boats travel on streets. | Boats sail in the sea. |
| People pay for what they don’t get. | People pay for what they get. |

### 5. Reading – *Gulliver’s Travels* (Adapted from Jonathan Swift)
- **Setting**: Gulliver discovers land, but it is inhabited by giants.
- **Adventure**:
- Sees a giant chasing his crew.
- Explores a field where crops are 40 feet tall.
- Encounters a giant reaper who picks him up.
- Gets observed by other giants.
- Visits the giant’s home, sits on a 30-foot-high table.
- Gets picked up by a baby and nearly eaten, but is saved by the mother.
- Dreams of home while sleeping on a handkerchief-sized bed.

## 6. New Words from Gulliver’s Travels
| Word | Meaning |
|---------------|------------------------------------|
| bellowing | very loud noise |
| inhabitants | people or creatures living in a place |
| barren | land with no vegetation |
| astonishment | great surprise |
| crumbled | broken into small pieces |
| grab | pick suddenly |

## 7. Grammar and Language Skills

### A. Similes and Descriptions
- Phrases like:
- *as white as snow*
- *as slow as a tortoise*
- *as sweet as honey*
- Application in creative sentence-making:
- *The old man’s hair is as white as snow.*
- *His feet were as cold as ice.*

### B. Cause and Effect
- Linking reasons with outcomes using real examples from the story:
- *Gulliver could not climb the fence because every step was six feet high.*

### C. Past Continuous Tense
- Combining ongoing past actions with interrupting events:
- *I was writing a letter when the lights went out.*
- *The farmer’s wife was stroking the cat when the baby entered.*

### D. Comparison (Degrees of Adjectives)
- *easy → easier → easiest*
- *strong → stronger → strongest*
- *exciting → more exciting → most exciting*
- Activities for comparison using skipping, jumping, and walking or comparing animals like dog, horse, and elephant.

### E. Punctuation Practice
- Correct use of:
- Capital letters
- Full stops
- Commas
- Apostrophes
- Question and exclamation marks
- Example:
- *Dear Samir,*
*I am sending you a photograph of my newest pet. Frisky is a bulldog...*

### F. Creative Writing
- Writing about:
- Giants (filling blanks with “giant land animal”, “giant bird”, etc.)
- Living in the land of dwarfs: students imagine and write their own adventure.

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## New Terms and Their Meanings

| Term | Meaning |
|--------------|-----------------------------------------------------------|
| topsy-turvy | upside down, in disorder |
| pleasure | joy, happiness |
| grand | great fun or large-scale |
| barren | empty, without vegetation |
| astonishment | great surprise |
| crumbled | broken into small parts |
| grab | suddenly pick up or hold |
| bellowing | loud noise (like trumpet or thunder) |
| reaping hook | curved tool for cutting crops |

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## Practice Questions

### Easy (3)
1. What time do children go to school in Topsy-turvy Land?
**Ans**: At night.

2. Where do boats travel in Topsy-turvy Land?
**Ans**: On the streets.

3. Who picked up Gulliver from the field?
**Ans**: A giant farmer.

### Medium (2)
4. Why did Gulliver feel frightened on the island?
**Ans**: Because he saw a huge creature chasing his crew and was surrounded by giants.

5. What were some strange things about Topsy-turvy Land?
**Ans**: People walked on heads, wore hats on feet, and buses travelled on water.

### Difficult (3)
6. Describe how Gulliver was treated at the farmer’s house.
**Ans**: He was placed on a dining table, offered bread crumbs, nearly swallowed by a baby, then saved and cared for by the kind farmer’s wife.

7. Write two comparisons using similes from the chapter.
**Ans**: (i) As white as snow
(ii) As slow as a tortoise

8. Write the sentence from the story that shows Gulliver was a learned man.
**Ans**: "I tried to speak to them loudly in several languages."

### Very Difficult (2)
9. Use the past continuous tense to combine: “Amit was doing his homework.” and “My pen ran out.”
**Ans**: Amit was doing his homework when my pen ran out.

10. Imagine a day in a topsy-turvy classroom and describe it in four lines.
**Ans**: The teacher sat on the floor while students stood on desks. They wrote with spoons and listened through their shoes. The chalk danced on its own. Nobody knew what subject they studied.

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