Feature finding

In our writing lesson, we focussed on identifying the features that are needed for a no chronological report. We found lots of features such as: title, subheadings, facts, third person and pictures with captions. We can’t wait to start writing our non chronological report about the Mayans.

Experience day lesson continues in MI

Today we continued with our experience day lesson from yesterday! We will be writing a persuasive letter to Mrs Atherton to ask her if we can become beekeepers! We recapped our learning from yesterday discussing emotive language, flattery and alliteration. We had another look at some of the ideas on our anchor chart where we described Mrs Atherton! We can’t wait to add these to our persuasive letters when we come to write them.

Today we thought about why crew MI are so amazing and how we can show we are. We worked in mini crews to build ideas then produced a class anchor chart. We then looked at a variety of video clips building background knowledge on the benefits of bees and why beekeeping is important. We build ideas in mini crews then as a whole crew. We then used our ideas and put them into some sentences. We are really enjoying our new writing unit 🙂

Find the Shape

Our next writing consisted of starting to unpick the model and look at examples of a non chronological report. We started off the lesson with a silent conversation where we had an opportunity to unpick the features of the model that had been completed for them. Children were good at identifying fronted adverbials, conjunctions, rhetorical questions and subject specific vocabulary.

Next they worked alongside their partner to unpick some double page spreads that are similar to what they will be producing at the end of this piece of writing. We saw some lovely collaboration between the pairs in crew. Once we were happy, we’d picked all the features out, we created a checklist that we’ll use when we write our own plot points.

Experience Lesson – Information Gathering

Today in writing, Crew Hamill gathered as much information as possible about Ancient Maya in order to have the facts we need for our double-page, non-chronological reports. We watched several videos that were full of interesting and detailed facts about the Maya civilisation and then used picture and word prompts to detail these notes, ready for our writing lessons. We found out lots that we were able to add to the knowledge we already had after our history case study. We’re going to come together to chot down as much as possible in our next lesson so that we have plenty to include in our reports.

Grammar – Non Chronological report

In our grammar lesson, we’ve really been honing in on the appropriate fronted adverbials and conjunctions you’d use within a non chronological report. We spent some time thinking about how we could link facts using fronted adverbials and which ones would best fit into the sentence. We also looked at models of a fiction and non fictions piece of writing so we could see the difference between the two. Finally we worked alongside our partner to start putting facts about the Mayans into sentences using appropriate fronted adverbials.

Crew Marsh has talent!

In today’s experience lesson we practised our different talents ready for our Crew Marsh talent show. We discussed how a good audience should sit with good sitting, listening ears and magnet eyes on the stage. We started our talent show with Noah introducing the show, then we had a group of animals telling us funny jokes. We then watched a dance. After that, we had hula hoopers and bean bag skills. Finally, Noah closed the talent show thanking everyone for coming. I was very impressed with all the talent we saw!

Find the shape – non-chronological reports

In today’s writing lesson, Crew Hamill began with a silent conversation in which we walked around the classroom looking at chunks of our model text, making a note of things we noticed, any features we could find and any fronted adverbials we could spot. We were able to identify some key features of a non-chronological report, such as paragraphs, subheadings and fronted adverbials. Following this, we looked at some example double-page spread reports and worked in mini crews to annotate them with praises and notices. We then came together as a crew and shared these. We were able to use these to generate a checklist of non-negotiables that we are going to use when writing our own non-chronological reports. This list included things like neat, cursive handwriting and accurate, detailed drawings.