In writing, it was a perfect opportunity to complete a recount after our visit to Magna. To help us prepare for the writing day, we spent some time ordering the events in chronological order. While the children completed the activity, I could hear the children starting to use time adverbials as they ordering them which will be one of our focus areas for writing.
Once we were happy the events were in order, we used our fronted adverbials word mats to start thinking about the ones that would be most appropriate for our writing. We then shared these back and created a bank of fronted adverbials that could be used when we write our recount.
To kick start our new writing unit on poetry, Crew Hamill have looked at lots of different examples of poetry, including a video of poet Micheal Rosen reciting his famous poem ‘Chocolate Cake’ (this made us all laugh a lot!) and a video of some Roald Dahl poems that have been turned into songs. We then worked in pairs to identify as many different features of poetry as we could, include rhyme, rhythm, line breaks, stanzas and personification.
Crew Hamill have worked extremely hard over the last few days to complete their independent write. We began with a recap of our grammar, ensuring we can still label the verb, subject and everything else in our sentences to ensure they are punctuated correctly. We then used a stimulus of a short film, Francis to create a descriptive piece of writing. We have chotted ideas together as a crew in order to complete a setting description of where Francis is as well as a character description of Francis herself. We have then used the resources available to us – word banks, chotting sheets and pictures – to write our descriptions.
The children have been working super hard on their writing skills. Now in a morning they write their names, numbers to 10, and now affirmation sentences. They have been amazing at recalling the properties of a sentence such as adding a full stop at the end. Well done crew F2.
After reading our story ‘Zombies don’t eat veggies’, in writing today a few of us in Crew Marsh spoke about what type of foods would be changed to fit the cuisine of a Zombie. We got so engrossed and came up with lots of great ideas including brain pizza, knees on toast and gut bolognaise! We then put all of our ideas on a slide and presented these ideas in our small group. We are working on orally recalling sentences and the children showcased this amazingly today, by linking their ideas to the story and using the characters names. What a gruesome experience!
This half term we have begun our next unit of writing, which we’re extremely excited about as it is going to be supporting us with our final product. Our genre is a type of monologue- a speech- focussing on ‘I have a dream for Doncaster’. We were immersed into the writing by watching example videos of monologues in films we love to obviously enjoy as the audience, but importantly build background knowledge and understand a purpose of speeches. We then participated in a conscience alley to reflect on our opinions of the pros and cons of Doncaster, as well as reflected on issues within our own community. We then backed this up with research our chosen dreams for Doncaster.
In grammar day, we consolidated clauses; we found the subject, verb and object within a clause. We also played punctuation bingo, which was a huge hit! This developed our knowledge and led us to today’s learning – Miss’ expectation of us using Y6 standard punctuation. We learnt about the purpose of colons and semicolons and made our very own sentences we could add into our introduction next lesson. The grammar refresh was definitely needed ready for progressing in our writing as well as ready for our grammar test next week.
Before the half term we make Valentine’s Day cards for our grown ups, we used our hands to make a flower, we also used toilet roll tubes to make love hearts! We also practiced our hand writing, look how good we’re see getting with writing our names!
In our English lesson today, we started to build up a bank of ideas for the characters in our narrative. We worked in small groups to think about what the characters would say when one of them is an expert and the other is a novice. In our next lesson, we will turn these ideas into speech which we will use later in in our writing sequence.
Crew Hamill have begun their next unit of writing this week which we’re extremely excited about as it is going to be supporting us with our final product. This unit is all about monologues (speeches). We began this unit by watching a few video examples of monologues to generate ideas on what they are and how they are performed, making notes in our mini crews on things that we noticed.
Once we had completed this, we then had a class discussion on the things that we liked and disliked about Doncaster as a city. This is because our speech is going to be focused on our dreams for Doncaster. On our second day of this lesson, we then worked in mini crews to organise given cards into two sections – things that Doncaster already has that are good and things that would make Doncaster a better place. Following this, we looked at some quotes from a recent Doncaster Free Press article of other people sharing their wishes for Doncaster in order to further develop our ideas. Once we had done this, we generated our own ideas and shared these with a crew.
To demonstrate our learning, we then created mind maps of ideas that we would like to include in our own speeches, illustrating our own dreams for Doncaster.
To consolidate our learning, we had a class vote on whether or not we would recommend Doncaster as a place to move to. We then had to justify our decision with reasons. Some of us believed it was a good place to come to as we have lots of shops, good schools and plenty of green spaces to play. Others believed it wasn’t the best place to move to as we would like it to have more employment opportunities and kinder, more respectful members of the community.
