Today, Crew Hamill had their second experience lesson in which they were identifying the features of a non-chronological report. We worked as a crew to look at an example report, sharing ideas about what we noticed – the title, paragraphs and pictures etc. We then looked at a ‘non-chronological report checklist’ and used this to identify further features such as subheadings and an introduction. Once we were comfortable that we understood the features, we worked in pairs to organise a non-chronological report that had been jumbled up. We had to work out which subheading matched which paragraph, identify the title, introduction and conclusion, and then figure out which order we would put the information in before deciding where the pictures would go. Once we had done this, we labelled each of the features and explained why they were important. To consolidate our learning, we played ‘checklist challenge’ in which we had 3 minutes to write down as many features as we could remember before seeing who had remembered the most!

To kick start our new writing unit on poetry, Crew Hamill have looked at lots of different examples of poetry, including a video of poet Micheal Rosen reciting his famous poem ‘Chocolate Cake’ (this made us all laugh a lot!) and a video of some Roald Dahl poems that have been turned into songs. We then worked in pairs to identify as many different features of poetry as we could, include rhyme, rhythm, line breaks, stanzas and personification.

Crew Hamill have worked extremely hard over the last few days to complete their independent write. We began with a recap of our grammar, ensuring we can still label the verb, subject and everything else in our sentences to ensure they are punctuated correctly. We then used a stimulus of a short film, Francis to create a descriptive piece of writing. We have chotted ideas together as a crew in order to complete a setting description of where Francis is as well as a character description of Francis herself. We have then used the resources available to us – word banks, chotting sheets and pictures – to write our descriptions.