Pupils enjoyed their first day back in class today – lots of activities and learning tasks, including some super engagement in writing.
Writing practice
Category : Writing
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.
Subordinate Clauses
Today, we had a practical session with subordinate conjunctions. Children were asked to rearranged the words to create a sentence that made sense with a subordinate clause. Once each group had completed their section they moved around the other sentences and worked together to move the subordinate clause either to the start or end of the sentence.
Four Corners
Before our writing grammar lesson yesterday, we played a game of 4 corners where children had to decide if a word was a noun, adverb, adjective or verb.
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.
Handa’s bananas 🍌🐒
Today we made bananas for our experience lesson, when Handa started walking to her friend Akeyo she walked past a tall tree which had a cheeky monkey in it, who pinched Handa’s bananana!!
We tried really hard at balancing our banana on our head just like Handa does. Look at our balancing!
Narrative Sequence
We started our new writing unit today which will be a narrative based around the film Ice Age. The last narrative we completed was our best piece of writing so we’re excited to get started.
After watching the video, we worked together in mini crews to sequence the events. Then we spent some time chatting notices, feelings and actions.
Subordinate clause ✍🏻
In our writing lesson today, we focussed on grammar which we will need in our narrative writing about The Ice Age. Our focus today was subordinate clauses but before we could look at these we looked at the difference between an independent clause and a dependent main clause. We learnt that an independent clause makes sense on its own and dependent clauses do not make sense by themselves and need a main clause to make sense. We then spotted how a subordinate clause can be at the start or end of a sentence. Then we had a go at piecing together some sentences whilst identifying the main clause and subordinate clause. We really enjoyed the extra challenge, where all the words were chopped up separately. We are so excited to try to include these in our writing. 😀✏️
