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.

Starting Friday and continuing today, Crew Hamill have been working on producing beautiful work they are proud of, in line with our Get Smart HoWL, to produce a full non-chronological report. We have used our writing from the last few weeks that we have edited and improved in order to fully answer our guiding question for this term: How does movement affect our world? We created an introductory plot point as well as two detailed paragraphs on how the movement of the planets and forces impact on our daily life. We’ve then used what we know about the layout of non-chronological reports to write this up in our most beautiful handwriting, supported by our handwriting lines. We’ve even illustrated these with relevant pictures.

Crew Hamill were so excited to get started with their first proper piece of writing in order to show off just how much knowledge we have gained during our grammar focus at the start of this year. We started by using our knowledge of subjects, verbs and leftovers to help Miss Hamill punctuate her model text. Once we had done this, we planned out what we were going to write in our own piece by using a subject, verb, leftover structure. We then worked as a crew to help Miss Hamill turn her plan into paragraphs, looking to see if we could join any of our single clause sentences together with a FANBOYS conjunction or if we could extend our sentences by adding leftovers at the beginning of the clause. We then put this into action ourselves to create our own paragraphs of writing.