Writing to answer our guiding question

9th December 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill were so excited to get started with their first proper piece of writing in order to show off just how much knowledge we have gained during our grammar focus at the start of this year. We started by using our knowledge of subjects, verbs and leftovers to help Miss Hamill punctuate her model text. Once we had done this, we planned out what we were going to write in our own piece by using a subject, verb, leftover structure. We then worked as a crew to help Miss Hamill turn her plan into paragraphs, looking to see if we could join any of our single clause sentences together with a FANBOYS conjunction or if we could extend our sentences by adding leftovers at the beginning of the clause. We then put this into action ourselves to create our own paragraphs of writing.

Children In Need – Pie Time!

19th November 2024Laura Hamill

To celebrate Children In Need, everyone who came to school and made a donation was able to take part in splatting Titch in the face with a whipped cream ‘pie’! It’s safe to say, everyone had fun! Even some of the adults joined in!

Conjunctions

19th November 2024Laura Hamill

The last thing we needed to learn before moving on to our writing sessions was how to join two independent clauses together. We learned all about coordinating conjunctions, known as FANBOYS – for, and, nor, but, or, yet and so. We then worked through a few example sentences in which we had to identify which conjunction had been used. Once we’d identified this, we looked at the independent clauses either side of the conjunction. We identified each verb and subject, allowing us to see how we had two independent clauses with a subject and a verb joined together with one of the FANBOY conjunctions. We also learned that these conjunctions can be used to join more than one subject together to create a compound subject (for example, The moon and the stars).

Verb, Subject, Leftovers in paragraphs

19th November 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill have tried really hard to develop their knowledge of verbs, subjects and leftovers by identifying them within paragraphs. We have been looking at unpunctuated paragraphs, with no capital letters, commas and full stops, and have used our knowledge of independent clauses having a subject and a verb to be able to work our where the punctuation belongs. We have found this tricky at times due to some of the vocabulary being difficult to understand but after working on it for a while, we are now much more confident!

World Kindness Day

19th November 2024Laura Hamill

Crew Hamill really enjoyed taking part in the interactive World Kindness Day assembly last week. We were really inspired by the stories we were told by the host and we have used this to reflect on our Be Kind HoWL. We have created ‘Kindness Balloons’ in our crew and will be adding a balloon every time someone does something kind. We’re hoping to have enough to make our house fly, like in Up! We also completed kindness tickets in which we wrote a note to someone who was important to us, explaining why we thought they were amazing.

Twig Letters

13th November 2024Tracy Haddock

In XP outdoors today the children made their initials using twigs, string and wool. First they looked for twigs and then they got the string to tie all the pieces into place for their initial. After that they then got some wool and made it look pretty.

Mechanisms

12th November 2024Laura Hamill

Today, Crew Hamill began looking at mechanisms. We began our lesson by testing our sticky knowledge and recapping previous learning. Following this, Miss Hamill introduced us to some new vocabulary that we would need to understand in order to access our lesson. We then had to look at pictures of different objects and decide which mechanism was being used with each one (E.g. a pulley for a flag pole). We then watched some informative videos about pulleys, lever and gears, making notes on big pieces of chotting paper in mini crews as we did so. Once we’d gathered all of our information, we inputted this onto a Padlet to keep a record of what we had learned.

When leftovers could belong to both clauses

12th November 2024Laura Hamill

Today, we looked at what happens when you are building single-sentence clauses but you have ‘leftovers’ that could belong to either clause you are creating. We followed our script to identify verbs and subjects, then labelled the leftovers that were easier to identify (the leftover at the end belonging to the second clause). We then looked at how the leftover in the middle could belong to either clause. It could be the ending of the first clause, adding extra information, or it could be used at the beginning of the second clause with a comma being used after it. We had a go at doing this in pairs and playing around with the structure of our clauses before completing our exit ticket to illustrate what we had learned.