English


Writing Instructions in Years 3 + 4

Have you ever tried to follow the instructions for making a Lego model and faced all kinds of difficulties?

This week, Class 3 have been learning all about how to write clear, detailed and precise instructions so that the reader is able to follow the instructions and have a very successful outcome.  We have been talking though each stage of the process of making a jam sandwich so that the reader doesn’t make any mistakes like: butter both sides of the bread, or put a dollop of jam in the centre of each slice and not spread across the whole surface of the slice.

We have also talked about the key features of good instructions which has included using imperative verbs, adverbs and time or adverbial openers.  The instructions also need to be in chronological order.  Year 4 have extended their work to include modal verbs.  If you have any trouble understanding any of these terms – ask anyone in Class 3!

Here we are making our sandwiches – this is called ‘Talk for Writing’! it is where we rehearse our ideas with our talking partners so that we are ready to put our ideas onto paper.  Look out for our amazing written instructions coming very soon…..!


World Book Day Wonders

Here are a selection of our amazing sock puppets of special book characters made to celebrate World Book Day 2022. We came together as a school to share our puppets and awarded prizes of £5 book tokens, kindly donated by FOLS.

We all loved your creativity and marveled at the many different ways you thought of to decorate your puppets. Thank you for all your hard work. 

In Assembly, Rev Bryan’s told us all about one of the most famous books in the world – The Bible. It is made up of different types of writing like poems, letters and biographies and was written by lots of different men and women. He showed us some Bibles written in different languages too – the one pictured below is in Hebrew.

After school, FOLS held a second hand book and hot chocolate stall – it was really popular and was great to see such a buzz around books with children recommending titles to each other and spotting books by authors they love – all for a bargain price! Thank you to FOLS for running this and to all who kindly donated and bought such lovely quality books which have now found new homes.

 


Reading Buddies

Year 6 visited EYFS today to hear their Reception buddies read.  Reception were thrilled to have the opportunity to share books with their friends and Year 6 were incredibly positive and inspiring reading role models.


Class 2 Trip to Beatrix Potter World and Brockhole

What a brilliant day we have had on our school trip!

The first part of the day was spent at Beatrix Potter World where we met Tim the Gardener and even Beatrix Potter herself. We learnt lots about her life, the inspirations behind her books and the characters featured in them. We also had fun completing an activity trail and loved exploring Mr. McGregor’s garden.

Then we hopped back onto the bus and made our way to Brockhole. We enjoyed our picnic lunch (indoors) and then learnt about some of the animals and their habitats featured in Beatrix Potter’s books through the centre’s new exhibition. Despite the weather we braved the outdoors and had a great time exploring the grounds. We identified physical and human features and completed the Beatrix Potter trail to find out more about the animals in her books.


Beauty and The Beast

Reception children all the way up to Year 6 really have had the most magical theatre experience today! The Dukes Theatre is always so welcoming, their well judged performances are a joy and this year was no exception. The action packed story was a more modern version with funny jokes to entertain the children with details keep the adults smiling too including details of magic and wonder! The children were keen to join in with audience participation including clapping along and letting the actors know if they agreed with their plans! Here is what some of the children had to say…

“The Beast was rather scary and the Dung Song at the start was great!”

“I liked it when the Beast and Bella were planting flowers and their friendship was growing too.”

“I was sitting on an end and so the Beast came really close to me!”

“My favourite bit was the dog as he spoke the word woof and he was called Nigel!”

 


Poetry Performances!

For anti-bullying week, class 4 have been working on some anti-bullying poetry. We have been inspired by spoken-word poets from around the world, listening closely to the ways in which they take their poems and perform them with passion, rhythm and emphasis.

Using the starter of “To this day….”, we generated ideas about how bullying might make a person feel. What would they think about looking back? How would it affect their lives? Using this, we constructed a poem with the ability to swap and change lines around to ensure we included rhythm and impact. We also made sure to finish our poems on a high note, celebrating the wonderful things that make us all special and unique.

Everyone has had an opportunity to perform their poem to an audience, but you might like to request a private performance of your own at home!

 


Order! Order!

In English, we have been using the topic of “refugees” to guide our writing as we read “The Boy at the Back of the Class”.

See the source image

As this is such an important and current topic, we have been writing a lot of persuasive pieces, encouraging people to change their minds about the issue. Even though this is a tough thing to do, it is an important life skill. It’s particularly tough when you need to argue against what you might actually believe in!

We capped our persuasive unit off with a big debate. We spent some time learning about the houses of parliament, and how debates are held and managed there. This allowed us to create our own mini-house of commons in our classroom, complete with Mace and speakers boxes! If you can believe it, there is even such a thing as a John Bercow soundboard, so Mr Dean took great delight in getting him to shout “order! order!” on demand. Everyone was referred to by their proper title of “the right honorable” and took turns to make their arguments.

Everyone should be very proud of how they conducted themselves throughout the debate. People listened carefully and respectfully to the arguments being made, and put forward some insightful counter-arguments which really helped to change minds. Well done all!


On The Way Home by Jill Murphy

Miss Robinson and Class 2 have been enjoying reading and exploring the story of On The Way Home by Jill Murphy. They analysed the sequence of the text and identified letters, words and sentences and what punctuation is used. Everyone has now planned their own version of the story, ready to write next week.

Here are photos of their English working wall.


English in Years 5+6

We have been using our knowledge of our solar system (linked to our Science topic) to plan, draft and write a non-chronological report on the Moon.

After looking at a range of non-fiction information texts from our library to identify the features and completing some thorough research on the topic for homework, we tried to sort some of examples of sentences so that we understand how to give our writing cohesion and make sense to the reader.

In groups, we began organising the information according to whether it would be appropriate for the introduction, one of the four main sections, the glossary or Did you Know?

This has helped us make sense of our research so that we can organise our writing into paragraphs under some suitable subheadings that we developed such as: ‘Physical Features’,  ‘Moon Exploration’, ‘Phases of the Moon’.


Storytelling and place value

We’ve made a super start to the new term in Class 3. We have had great fun learning to tell the story of “Why dog is friends with man” inspired by a local storyteller Taffy Thomas. If you’d like to hear the tale, do ask anyone in Class 3 and they’ll spend a happy 5 minutes with added actions and sound effects to entertain you!

We have also been working hard on representing numbers in different ways. Year 4 have proudly worked out lots of representations of 4 digit numbers here from a range of images.