Last week, we joined a hangout with schools around the world to create our own adventure short stories. The children throughly enjoyed using their imagination and having the freedom to write their own ideas down on paper.
Christmas writing
Category : Writing
Beautiful Work
Starting Friday and continuing today, Crew Hamill have been working on producing beautiful work they are proud of, in line with our Get Smart HoWL, to produce a full non-chronological report. We have used our writing from the last few weeks that we have edited and improved in order to fully answer our guiding question for this term: How does movement affect our world? We created an introductory plot point as well as two detailed paragraphs on how the movement of the planets and forces impact on our daily life. We’ve then used what we know about the layout of non-chronological reports to write this up in our most beautiful handwriting, supported by our handwriting lines. We’ve even illustrated these with relevant pictures.
Writing to answer our guiding question
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.
Writing experience
In writing, we started our writing unit by looking at good examples of a non chronological report and gathered lots of ideas together to help us write some independent clauses. We ensured that our clauses had a subject and verb.
Writing so far…
To activate into our experience day we refreshed our subject knowledge of physics, with a particular focus on our CS2 expeditionary learning all about forces. What better way to do this other than a Kahoot! We then focused on our writing focus of exploring features in a non chronological report. To begin with we focused on identifying the presentational features and with a partner analysed the text’s purpose and audience of our model. We then delved deeper by reading and identifying the language features whilst considering the purpose. We did the same again with another non chronological report on a different subject to reiterate the text-type specific features in non chronological reports.
Experience Day Part 2
In part 2 of our experience day, we began critiquing presentational features of various non chronological reports made by children to spark our imagination. We also chotted ideas for titles and headings using miss’ help sheet she had created. Finally, we planned the layout of our individual non chronological reports.
Sentence Days
So far we have written 4 plot points of our non chronological report. We have retrieving facts from a given text based on our structure, then up-levelled based on our targets. Throughout the process we have used childrens examples to critique in order to help us purple pen our own work. We will be ready to draft next week and we cannot wait to publish them into beautiful double page spreads!
Grammar in MI
Today we discussed cohesion within and between paragraphs. We spent some time unpicking different paragraphs on different extinct animals. We discussed TIDE, where we found the transition/introductory sentence, the we found the development sentences then moving onto the ending sentence. We used highlighters to show these different sections. We then focussed on the Tecopa pupfish again using TIDE to explore the paragraph. From here we grouped our facts into sections which will support us when we write our plot point.
We then moved onto modifying the different verbs in a paragraph with adverbials. We looked at a piece of text, identifying the verb/verb phrase, the subject and the leftovers. We quickly realised that the sentences were very simple and included lots of repetition. From here we used TRaMP yo modify an adverbial, thinking about time, reason, manner and place. We then moved the adverbials around to show different structures. We are looking forward to continuing with this tomorrow.
Writing in MI
MI have started their new writing/grammar unit looking at extinct animals. Over the last few days we have been taking part in a series of diagnostic tasks that are allowing us to digest lots of grammar that will be needed when it comes to writing our own non-chronological report. Today we thought about adverbials of time, manner and place along with identifying main and subordinate clauses. We moved our sentences around changing the order of the main and subordinate clause. We have added our anchor charts to our working wall which we will use when we start to write.
Conjunctions
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
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!
Computing meets PVPG
Recently, we have been enjoying our computing lessons so much that the children are using AI(artificial intelligence) at home. It is so lovely to see this high level of engagement and even a couple of children have made story books (with the help of AI). It has now become a regular occurrence to read them as we walk down the corridor to break. With us hooked with AI, Miss thought it would be a good idea to incorporate this into our grammar application lesson. The children loved prompting AI to generate a short paragraph with no punctuation that they had to then identify the verb/verb phrase, subject, coordinating conjunction, leftovers and then punctuate to identify the main clauses. Obviously this was my favourite short paragraph!
