Perfect Penguin Predictions 🐧📖✏️

To kickstart our new writing unit, based on the story Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers, for our experience lesson we discussed what we knew about penguins and predicted what the book would be about based on the front cover. We also watched an interesting video all about different types of penguins! Did you know there is a Fairy Penguin 🐧 that lives in Australia! 🇦🇺

Experience lesson in MI

Today we were introduced to our next writing unit, a non chronological report on tigers. Our experience lesson allowed us to build background knowledge on tigers by watching a variety of clips. We verbally voiced the facts we had learnt as well as writing some down. After watching the clips, we all shared our facts with the whole crew. From here we started to group our facts into different areas e.g appearance, diet, habitat and threats. We then explored a non chronological report, finding the features and thinking about the facts within it.

✏️Our independent writing journey✏️

We then used our planning, working wall and TWS help box to ensure we were reaching our ME.

After having our work read, Miss wasn’t satisfied we were all writing for genre and purpose. Some of us slipped into narrative writing. We had a lesson unpicking a diary and another child’s example and up-levelling. From what we had refreshed, we then went back and redrafted our writing.

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.