Last week, we spent some time revisiting editing and redrafting out writing. We were shown examples of work from books and then we worked together to edit for things like punctuation and sense. Once we were happy we had completed the editing, we worked together to redraft which could have considered of added a fronted adverbial, conjunction or adding further description.
Today, Crew Hamill began their new writing genre and discussed that we would be creating a non-chronological report all about Ancient Maya. We have done lots of historical learning over the last few weeks in expedition that we will be using to support this writing and we are going to be using one of our class texts to gather further information. To begin this new genre, we looked at our first grammar focus: fronted adverbials. We discussed what these were and read two different passages that contained them. We discussed how these are used differently depending on the genre we are writing and made comparisons between the two passages. Following this, we worked in talk partners to identify which fronted adverbials would be most appropriate in a non-chronological report. We then up-levelled sentences by adding fronted adverbials to them to make them more interesting. We can now use these sentences when we begin writing our plot points!
In writing, we have started preparing to write our next piece. We will be writing a newspaper article about the book that we are currently reading. Our experience day was to spend some time reading, comparing and exploring newspapers – their style, content and appearance. Following this, we contributed our ideas to build a picture of what we noticed, what we liked and what we wondered about newspapers as a genre. We’re looking forward to building on these ideas to help us write our own article!
Today we continued to write our stories…
Now that we’ve finished our plot points, it’s time to edit and redraft some of our writing. In our writing lesson on Friday, we were shown some examples of writing from children’s books and we were shown how to edit a piece of work. Then we had an opportunity to work through some sentences and share our thoughts with the rest of the class. Next, we’ll look at redrafting and have time to redraft our own writing so we can uplevel it.
During our writing lesson, we’ve been discussing the importance of proofreading our writing. Before completing our plot point, we swapped books and provided some praises and wonders to help our partners move their learning forward.
In preparation for our final plot point in writing, we were super excited to spend a lesson taste testing a number of different types of sweets. These sweets triggered different taste buds on our tongue, meaning we reacted to them in different ways. We were able to use our experience to create a bank of vocabulary to support our writing. We pulled lots of funny faces – especially with the sour and fizzy sweets.
Today the children were recapping on what they’ve learnt so far in grammar.
This week, as part of The Write Stuff we have begun to read a new book, ‘All afloat on Noah’s boat’ to support our Expedition learning. The book begins with Noah building his ark, therefore we worked in mini crews to build our own arks just like him. During the activity we also generated lots of vocabulary that Mrs Elmer chotted so that we could use this to empower our writing at the end of the week. Such as, we thought about the actions that we were doing that would have been similar to Noah, ‘tapping’, ‘fixing’, ‘concentrating’ and ‘joining’. We also shared how we felt building the arks to experience how we thought Noah might be feeling, ‘happy and excited because I love building’, ‘happy, I like crafting’, ‘nervous and frightened because my boat might not be big enough’, ‘scared because my boat might not float’, ‘hot and tired because building is hard work’. Watch this space for some fabulous writing to come!
In grammar today the children were looking at preposition.
