Beautiful Work – Writing

Project Overview

Harry Potter and the Clapgate Pygmy goats!

To hook the children into the world of Harry Potter, we began our creative context day by sorting the children into Hogwarts houses. The children loved it – they chose an edible witch’s hat and bit into it. The hat then revealed coloured chocolate, which determined their house for the day. The children then took part in workshops such as: wand making, escape room games, playing quidditch and creating potions.

Throughout the term, the children wrote about different genres including, descriptive writing about Hogwarts, making a 'Wanted' poster for Voldermort, writing a set of instructions to tell the reader how to make their potion, creating a persuasive advert for a magical wand. In addition, pupils had multiple opportunities to present work in front of an audience to develop their physical oracy skills.

In the final weeks of this half-term, the classes spent time with our school goats (Pablo and Pedro) and made notes about their characters, behaviour and habitat; to increase their knowledge further, children also spent time researching the Internet. The final piece of work was a brilliant non-chronological double-page report of Pygmy goats!

Project Overview

This half term, the children in year 4 have been reading the book 'The Firework Maker's Daughter' and creating lots of amazing pieces of work surrounding it! We produced instructions on how to make our very own firework, described the setting in which we were having our adventures, and created a poster advertising our main event - the firework display!

To end our half term, all of the children worked in groups to create their very own firework display using dance, sound and art. They worked incredibly hard and the results were amazing. There was lots of onomatopoeia, dancing, glitter and ribbon, which created the most amazing displays. We are so proud of their hard work!

This has been an incredibly fun start to year 4 and it has been great to see the pupils so excited about their work and working so well together. Their use of team work and creativity has amazed us all and we can't wait to see the rest of the hard work they produce throughout year 4. 

Project Overview

Year 4 - Thor's Adventures!

This half term, our writing has been focused on Norse mythology and the exciting adventures of Thor! We have explored many classic texts such as Thor and the Frost Giants, and Thor and the Sea Serpent. The pupils have really enjoyed reading these stories, and they have aided their fantastic writing!

The pupils worked hard to produce a fantastic narrative of their own, which involved Thor, a ship wreck and a missing weapon! All the pupils decided how their story would go and they created amazing work they should be proud of. To aid this creation, we enjoyed many activities such as acting out our very own battles, searching the school for missing dragons, reading around the campfire and experiencing our very own shipwreck!

This has been a really enjoyable unit of work and each child has worked very hard. We can't wait to see what adventures next term has in store for us, but we will not soon forget all the fun we have had in Spring 2.

Project Overview

Year 4 - Studying Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'

In writing this half term we have been focusing on Shakespeare's play 'The Tempest.' The Tempest is an exciting play all about a wizard called Prospero who has been banished to an island with his daughter Miranda. There are many twists and turns in this play which year four really enjoyed, and the most exciting of all came when Miranda fell in love with another of the characters, Ferdinand!

We have all really enjoyed learning all about Shakespeare and The Tempest. We have been looking at the Tudors in history, so we have enjoyed some great discussions about this period and Shakespeare himself. We were fascinated to learn that in Shakespeare's plays, the women were played by men. This was replicated very well by Harry in 4RM, who played the role of Miranda in his group's retelling of the story!

In our books we have produced some great pieces of writing, focusing on speech, description and narrative. We have included some amazing vocabulary and are really getting to grips with how to use speech effectively.

Project Overview

Year 3 - Seasonal Poetry

This half term the children were very lucky to have a visit from a poet. They took part in a poetry workshop and created their very own line poems. The children learnt about similes and began to use these in their poetry.

During our writing lesson we went outside and looked at the trees in our orchard. We thought about the different things they would see, hear, feel and smell and created a class list. The children had great fun pretending to be a tree and they had some amazing ideas to use in their poetry.

Back in the classroom, the children shared their ideas and discussed adjectives that could be use to describe the tree trunk, the leaves, the air, the wind and the sky. We then discussed how these words could be used to create different similes. 

Project Overview

Year 1 - Writing

This half term we have enjoyed learning about animal habitats. To link with this we went on a lovely trip to Temple Newsam Farm and explored the farm and the grounds.

We have spent a lot of time getting to know the story of 'Farmer Duck'. We used Talk for Writing to act out the story and create a story map of Farmer duck. The story map helped us to remember the order of the story, the key parts and our actions to act it out.

We then made our own individual story maps where we chose our own character for the story and our own key events.

We used our story maps to help us to write our own narrative.

Project Overview

Year 5 - Daedalus and Icarus

This half term the children have learnt about Ancient Greece. We have looked at the Greek myth 'Daedalus and Icarus'. The story is about a young boy named Icarus and his father, Daedalus. They are sent to make a labyrinth for King Minos. He is a powerful and cruel leader who wants to hide the Minotaur in the maze. When they have finished building the maze, they realise they will never be allowed to return home as they are the only ones who know the secrets of the maze. One day, Daedalus surprises Icarus with some wings he has made from wax and bird feathers. They begin the journey home. However, Icarus ignores his fathers pleas and fly's to close too the sun resulting in him plummeting to his death. The children thoroughly enjoyed reading this myth and were very surprised when they came into school and saw that Icarus' remains had made their way into our classroom! The children had to become detectives and even wrote their own police reports based on the evidence they found. Following on from this, we planned, wrote and edited our own stories based upon this legendary myth. 

Project Overview

Y6 - Climate Change Warriors

Project Overview

This half term, Y6 have dived into their learning about global warming and climate change. They have enjoyed learning about real life issues and have used these to inspire their writing.  

We began our learning by becoming experts on the causes of climate change and what we can do to stop global warming. We listened to Greta Thunberg's speeches and devised our own list of features to include in order to persuade the listener to care.

We held our very own COP 26 where pupils took on the roles of some of the world's leaders and debated how we can make a positive difference. 

Following all our learning about persuasive writing, Y6 then wrote their own persuasive speeches about a subject matter that they are passionate about. These ranged from issues such as deforestation and animal rights to racism in football and sexism in sports.

Project Overview

Year 6 - National Poetry Day

On the 7th October this year, we celebrated National Poetry Day. This is a day where poetry is a focus around the whole country and is shared. In Year 6, we spent the whole week looking at a variety of poetry in Reading lessons and practising how to perform them. As a taster, we decided to look at archaic poems, comedy poems, nonsense poems and modern poems, each with different messages. To also reflect Black History Month, we also chose poems that reflected this through some poetry by Maya Angelou and John Agard. The poems we looked at were:

• The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
• Macavity by T.S. Eliot
• Stealing by Carol Ann Duffy
• Half-caste by John Agard
• Six O'clock News by Tom Leonard
• Caged Bird by Maya Angelou

Overall we had a fanatstic week and the children really learnt a lot about the background of these poems, the poets themselves and how to read them aloud, memorise them and perform them. We are incredibly proud of how well they took part and they all really engaged with poetry in a fantastic way!

Project Overview

Outdoor Reading and Writing - Year 6

This half term, Year 6 spent some of their reading and writing lessons outdoors, inspired by nature and using our school's 'Reading Trail'. During our reading lessons, children were inspired by picture books and created story boards out of natural objects and became story tellers to the rest of the class. They enjoyed performing beloved stories such as, 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' and 'The Gruffalo'. We then looked at 'Into the Woods' by Anthony Browne and enjoyed reading this with added dramatic elements and predicting the ending with some group performances.

In writing, the children have been inspired by nature to create Kennings and Acrostic poems inspired by natural objects around them and the book, 'The Lost Words' by Robert Macfarlane. The children produced some fantastic pieces of poetry full of beautiful language and enjoyed taking the time to pause and enjoy the beauty in the nature that surrounded them.

Project Overview

'The Way Back Home' by Oliver Jeffers

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.

Project Overview

Year 2- Writing- Far, far away, high, high above, a mysterious creature lived...

Project Overview

Year 2 have based their writing around the text of George and the Dragon by Chris Wormwell.  This is a fantasy story about a mysterious dragon that wants to capture a princess in her castle. By using our writing scheme, the Write Stuff, the children have really dug deep into their imagination and written incredibly detailed sentences about the dragon chasing and capturing it's victims. 

Project Overview

The Highwayman

During our writing lessons we follow 'The Write Stuff' scheme of work. 

This half term we used the narrative poem 'The Highwayman' to inspire our writing. First of all we  looked at the poem and identified its shapes. We found that the poem had 3 main shapes: stanzas, key events and repeated refrain. We then completed an experience day, where we found out what a highwayman was. After that, completed 10 sentence stacking lessons using our teachers ideas and our own ideas to create our own poems based on 'The Highwayman'. Finally, we used everything we were taught to write our own narrative poems. We really enjoyed this unit of writing!