Reading into Writing: Blog items
Year 2- A visit from Dan Worsley
Date: 21st Jan 2025 @ 4:17pm
Today, after a story telling assembly, we were joined in class by author Dan Worsley who worked with us with our descriptive writing. We came up with our own penguin character, taking inspiration from 'And Tango Makes Three' and used adjectives and similes to describe it. Some of us even got to put on Dan's special story telling jacket and share our ideas with the class.
Year 3- Discussing stereotypes!
Date: 21st Jan 2025 @ 1:45pm
In this lesson we looked at the book ‘Julian is a Mermaid’. In this book it looks at a young boy who wants to become a mermaid. The children discussed people’s stereotypes and used our Oracy skills to discuss and share ideas on different topics. We discussed how people may think ballet it only for boys and football is only for girls, but how this is not true and we must challenge these stereotypes. From this book we will create a play script.
Year 3- Developing our Oracy skills!
Date: 10th Jan 2025 @ 4:06pm
In this session Year Three were developing their Oracy skills. The children looked at how to build a conversation and what was needed to structure talk effectively. The children then used this and took on a role in the conversation, to discuss different questions and listened carefully to the answers of other children.
Date: 9th Jan 2025 @ 8:06pm
This week, Year 4 have been looking at news reports. The class have analysed several different reports such as the Lionesses winning the Euros in 2022, the recent weather in the UK and recent wildfires in LA, California.
The children have found that there are many different features including direct and reported speech!
Next week, the class will be looking at how they will be gaining the skills to write their own news report.
Date: 7th Jan 2025 @ 7:00pm
We were all very excited to come back to school after the Christmas holidays! We began today by reading our new story 'Lost and Found.' We learnt about the characters, the setting and the key events within the story. We then ordered the story, labelled the key characters/objects, retold the story in our storytelling areas and made cut and stick penguins!
Date: 19th Dec 2024 @ 8:23am
During the first part of this term, Year 5 read Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo. We really enjoyed learning about the characters, their emotions and what it takes to write a book that we were all so engaged with - it rapidly became a year group favourite; so much so that in the final part of Autumn 2 we watched the film! We then spent some time analysing the film versus the book, discussing how much had been left out (due to time) and hwo much more vivid the details were when we didn't rely on our imagination but were instead presented with a fully animated, living, breathing world right on the screen!
Date: 9th Dec 2024 @ 10:45am
Through our Reading into Writing the children have been working on our oracy skills. We have looked at what our body language should be when we are listening to each other. We then looked at how to work as a team. The children discussed the key skills they would need and then used these skills to play a teamwork game.
Year 2- Writing a Christmas Story
Date: 5th Dec 2024 @ 11:02am
Year Two are beginning to write a christmas story based on the John Lewis advert Excitable Edgar. So far, we have immersed ourselves in different stories that have been told through a variety of Christmas adverts including the Christmas truce, Monty the penguin and the man on the moon. Throughout, we have discussed the problem and solutions for a story, main characters and the different settings. We noticed, good stories have lots of descriptive language so through our GPS sessions we have explored using adjectives to describe characters and settings as well as adverbs to describe actions. We are looking forward to planning and drafting our final stories.
Date: 5th Dec 2024 @ 8:12am
Our writing journey over the past couple ofweeks has been crime stories. We read lots of different examples of crime stories and gathered lots of ideas and vocabulary to add into our own stories. Some of us wrote stories about a robbery in a mansion and others wrote about a dog-napping. Read through some of stories below.
Date: 4th Dec 2024 @ 7:41am
This week Year 1 have been reading and exploring the story 'Stickman' by Julia Donaldson. We have sequenced the story, used semantics to create sentences about the characters, written speech bubbles and explored lots of different related activities in our outdoor area.
Date: 27th Nov 2024 @ 3:47pm
Today, we celebrated no pen morning by completing activities without picking up any writing devices. In Reading into Writing, we began our Christmas story unit by immersing ourselves in a variety of christmas adverts that tell a story. We enjoyed watching the adverts before discussing who the main characters were, what the problem and solution were in the story as well as generating adjectives to describe characters and settings. In Maths, we explored adding two 2-digit numbers using base 10 and place value counters to help us; we learnt we need to add the ones first to help us in the future when it crosses a ten.
Date: 27th Nov 2024 @ 11:55am
In Maths, for no pen morning we used our place value knowledge to create a ‘Number Museum’. We were given a number which we had to display in as many ways as possible with Maths resources and other resources around the room. We also had to include a red herring for other groups to try and find when they were visiting our museum. In Reading into Writing, we used our computing skills to edit a WABOLL playscript. To end the morning, we used our oracy and active listening skills. We have been learning about active listening in our 'Skills for Life' lessons and assemblies. We had to ask our pair questions and make sure that we listened to their response and reasoning well enough to retell the rest of the class what we had learnt about each other.
Date: 20th Nov 2024 @ 6:43pm
Over the past few weeks, Year 1 have been reading, creating and writing about 'Leaf Man.' This story involves using lots of imagination to spot the leaf characters in the pictures and think about where they are going! After reading the story, we printed our own leaf man, found him in our forest school area and completed lots of different writing activties relating to the story.
Date: 4th Nov 2024 @ 4:41pm
Through our Reading into Writing journey this half term, we are looking at Fairy Tales. The children identified that direct speech was needed as a feature of this genre. The children have been working hard to include inverted commas in their writing to create direct speech. They will then use this in their final piece of writing.
Date: 2nd Nov 2024 @ 7:59pm
This week we have read the story 'Room on the Broom.' We began the week by talking about the characters, the setting and the key events, before ordering the story. Throughout the week we have then labelled the characters, composed sentences about the witch and the dragon and written speech bubbles, thinking about what different characters may say at different parts of the story.
Date: 1st Nov 2024 @ 9:45am
In Acorns we have a multi-sensory approach to phonics. This week we have been exploring the 'P' sound.
We use activities such as 'what's in the box', mark making in sensory materials and funky fingers to strengthen our fine motor skills to support writing.
We have loved using pumpkins and pegs, building on our Halloween theme this week, to engage our focus, develop our concentration skills, along with our finger strength, while pushing and hammering the pegs into the pumpkin as well as learning the letter p.
Date: 31st Oct 2024 @ 7:37am
Today we immersed ourselves into different examples of letters. We recapped some of the key features and tried to identify them in a range of letters including: the sender, the receiver, the reason for writing and any questions the sender asked. We also found the senders address on each letter.
Date: 16th Oct 2024 @ 4:33pm
This half term we have linked our writing with our work on Black Hisgtory Month. We learned about Harriet Tubman, a slave who lived and worked on a plantation in Maryland in the early 1800s. She escaped from her master and went on to have a successful life helping other slaves who escaped. We wrote news articles linked to her escape and typed them out. Have a read at some of our work below...
Year 5 - Reading into Writing - Oracy
Date: 16th Oct 2024 @ 1:43pm
A new Reading into Writing journey has begun and we are looking at Non-Chronological reports; specifically linking to our learning in Geography: Mountains! As always, our first lesson was an Oracy lesson. We looked at Physical Oracy and how facial expression and eye contact can impact how we speak and how (and if!) we are listened too. In the second part of the lesson, we looked more closely at our writing focus of mountains and, using key vocabulary (such as foot, summit and valley) we climbed our very own mountains in class - looking at our actions, thoughts, internal dialogues and the five senses...some of us were very cold and some of us had to overcome our fear of heights!
Year 5 - Blue Peter badge winner!
Date: 16th Oct 2024 @ 11:50am
Albie was very proud to share the news that he has recently recieved a Blue Peter badge for his passion for reading. He had to get in touch with the Blue Peter team and share a list of his favourite authors and books and then write about his passions and opinions when it comes to childrens books. The team were so impressed by his penmanship and passion that they awarded him a very special Blue Peter badge made from recycled yoghurt pots!
Well Done Albie, we are so proud of you!
Date: 14th Oct 2024 @ 2:32pm
To start our Black History Month learning, we used our previous knowledge and online resources to create a PowerPoint slide about what Black History Month is, when it is celebrated in the UK and why we celebrate it. When looking at sporting achievements, we focused on the Men’s England National Team. We first looked at all the players heritages and we were surprised to find 8 out of 11 players heritage is black. We imagined what the England time would be like without them – we would only have three players!
Year 4 focused on sporting achievements for Black History Month and we are linking this to our Reading into Writing non-chronological report writing. We will be writing about Jude Bellingham, but to start our journey of non-chronological reports we have been looking at lots of WAGOLLs.
Date: 8th Oct 2024 @ 7:33pm
Today we took part in our first Spelling Bee of the year. Each house was represented by the best spellers from Year 2 - Year 6 and the children were tested on spellings they have been learning in Autumn 1. After a spelling test in class last week, Jake, Felix, Rose and Reinier represented their houses from Year 5 today.
The over all winners were Bathurst, who managed to spell 14/15 spellings across all 5 years groups. Well done to all who took part!
Date: 8th Oct 2024 @ 3:55pm
Today we held our first Spelling Bee of the year. Each house was represented by the best spellers from Year 2 - Year 6 and the children were tested on spellings they have been learning in Autumn 1. We are very proud of all the children for being their house representative and spelling some very tricky words in front of the whole school. The over all winners were Bathurst, who managed to spell 14/15 spellings across all 5 years groups.
Date: 8th Oct 2024 @ 3:01pm
Today, Year Two participated in our house competiton of the spelling bee. The children represented their houses with pride and tried really hard to spell some of the words aloud that we have learnt so far. Well done to our four representatives, you did great!
Date: 3rd Oct 2024 @ 9:32am
As part of our Reading into Writing journey, we have worked collboratively to write a paragraph for a biography about Billie Eilish. Our paragraphs had to include a fronted adverbial and a range of pronouns and possessive pronouns.
