‘The Way Back Home’ by Oliver Jeffers

Project Overview

 

As a school, we use ‘The Write Stuff’ approach to our writing lessons.

This half term we used the narrative ‘The Way Back Home’ to inspire our story writing. We had experience days mixed within our writing lesson. For example, during an experience lesson, children used drama to explore the moon and they used ‘hot-seating’ to question the boy. 

Each lesson is made up of two learning chunks. For each chunk we encourage the children to list a variety of vocabulary that can be used to create their own sentence after they have watched the teacher model.

What The Student Says

 “I loved pretending to fly to the moon in an aeroplane and move around the classroom like an astronaut.” – Year 1 (1FP)

“I am getting really good at writing similes!” – Year 1 (1FP)

“I liked asking the boy questions and listening to the answers.” – Year 1 (1LS)

What skills were developed?

The children are starting to learn the features and techniques of writing. Here are a few examples we have used in this narrative:

  • Starting a sentence with a capital letter
  • Using finger spaces
  • Ending a sentence with a full stop
  • Onomatopoeia
  • Conjunctions
  • Expanded noun phrases
  • Verbs
  • Adjectives
  • Similes
  • Dialogue
  • Questions

What The Teacher Says

“The children really enjoyed writing their own version of this story – especially when it the alien arrived on the moon! Before the children write a ‘chunk’ of writing they gather ideas for vocabulary in a list – they chat with friends to help get even more ideas. This provides a bank of vocabulary to help with their writing.

I have truly been wowed by the effort and quality of work produced in the children’s books.”

Miss Holmes  1FP Class Teacher.