Writing Speech – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

After having time to work alongside out partners to write speech, it was now time to write speech independently. We watched the video, took note of what was being said and by who before recording this in our books and punctuating it. It was lovely to see some children push themselves to green and experience with having the reporting clause at the start and end of the sentence.

Inverted Commas

In our writing lesson today, we had the opportunity to start creating a bank of speech that we could use in our writing along with our shoulder partners. We have become more confident with being able more the reporting clause. In our next lesson, we’ll work more independently to demonstrate our ability to punctuate direct speech

Prefix or Suffix?

In our grammar lesson this afternoon, we looked at what prefixes and suffixes are and what they do to a root word. We found out that a prefix goes at the start of a word and a suffix is added at the end of the word. We played the prefix pair game, where we matched up the correct prefix to the root word. We had lots of fun and was then able to apply this to our independent learning task.

Heading and subheadings ✏️

In grammar this afternoon, we looked at why headings and subheadings are used in nonfiction texts. We discussed how headings are used to tell you what the page is about and subheadings are used to tell you what the paragraph will be about. We then had a go at matching the paragraph to the correct subheading.

Grammar – Subordinating Clauses 🔗

We worked in mini crews to put chunks of sentences together in order to create full sentences that included a subordinate clause (a clause that does not make sense on its own). The sentences we created were:

  • Small streams of water trickled over the edge of the dam as the animals walked by.
  • The mammoth watched as the dark, gloomy cave began to fill up with water.
  • The large rock plummeted to the bottom of the flood waters as the mammoths froze in shock.
  • The frantic animals climbed onto the huge, hollow boat as the flood waters began to worsen. 

We discussed which part of these sentences was the main clause and which part was the subordinate. We also discussed whether our sentences could be put in a different order and still make sense.

Learning about determiners ✍🏻

In grammar, Crew Hamill learned all about determiners. To begin our lesson, we discussed the difference between vowels and consonants and identified this in mini crews. This helped us to decide which determiner to use before each of our vowels. We learned that if the word begins with a vowel (a, e, i, o, u) then we must use an as a determiner and if it begins with a consonant (any of the other 21 letters) we must use a. We also learned about exceptions to this rule – e.g. hour. Even though this starts with a consonant, it actually makes a vowel sound so we would have to use an.