Foundation – Rosie’s Walk Collaborative Map Making – 11/3/22
As part of our topic ‘Ready, Steady, Grow’, we read ‘Rosie’s Walk’. We discussed where Rosie went and all the things she spotted during the story. We collaborated to create our own map to show all the different things she saw. We drew lots of the places and people she went past and demonstrated our excellent Growth Mindset by labelling our work as well.
Look at our great maps. Teamwork definitely makes the dream work!
We have been so busy already for World Book Week, reading lots of poems. We have read poems with rhyming words and poems which do not rhyme. We have read sad poems and funny poems. Some poems really made us laugh!
We have also shown our excellent growth mindset attitude in order to become authors and illustrators. We are collaborating with everyone in the school to create a Hazeldown book and we are so proud of the work we have done. Look at our excellent writing. We are working so hard to join our letters and sit the letters on the line. You can see how we are using our phase 3 digraphs and trigraphs to write some quite challenging words.
If you could create your own story about anything in the whole world, what would it be about?
Across the whole school, we have been thinking deeply about ‘why’ we do things. Pupils, just like adults, tend to perform better if they have a strong understanding of the purpose of the task.
In Year 6, we have been using the purpose to help us make out writing suit the purpose. So far this year we have: written stories for sale as an e-book, created display pieces including poetry for an exhibition and written stories to make a class book for the library.
In our new unit, a unit looking at women in science, we asked the pupils to think about what our purpose might be. We had a lively discussion and, as a class, decided our outcome. We have decided that we would like to inform the wider world about these amazing women who have changed our world.
To make this even more powerful, we have decided to release our information as a range of media: blogs, podcasts, videos, presentations and more. Once we have created these, we can release them over time to keep people interested in learning about these amazing women.
We hope you are looking forward to seeing the products of our learning.
In Foundation, we have been working hard to develop our writing skills. This week, we decided to write our Christmas lists ready for Christmas Day. We worked so hard to form our letters beautifully and used our phonic knowledge to support us in writing words.
We were resourceful and used sound mats to help us form our letters correctly. We were also resilient and kept trying even when we found it tricky!
Amazing work Foundation! 🙂
We have been working so hard on our writing during our phonics lessons and guided writing sessions.
We are very confident at segmenting words to write and have been writing words all on our own. Look how we have focussed so carefully on our handwriting. Our growth mindset during lessons has helped us to love the challenge of writing and we strive to improve the quality of our work all the time. In the pieces below, you can see that we have evaluated what have we have done and reduced the size of the letters.
Look at our writing. You can see the lead in and exit strokes of our letters and we are starting to join them up.
In Palm class, we have been story mapping our new class text “Augustus and his smile”. We are doing this to try and help us learn the story, learn all of its features and expand our vocabulary. We have really enjoyed working as a team and making actions to go alongside the words. We are very resilient when practicing our story mapping as we often forget the words or actions and remind ourselves that mistakes are our friends! We think it might be one of our favourite books we have learnt about so far.
We have been working so hard at school again this week. We have done some wonderful writing, marvellous maths and brilliant playing. Look at what we have been up to!
Thank you Foundation for all the lovely work you have been sending to us! We love to see what you have been up to and all the adults are so impressed with your hard work. Look at all this fabulous writing! We have been learning about the life-cycle of frogs recently and some of our children have found tadpoles! Do you think they will turn into frogs? What will happen as they change?
Look at our fantastic models. Because we wrote labels to say what they are, we are able to display them in the classroom until ‘Friday tidy’! Look at our amazing writing!
Year Two have been enjoying the story George’s Marvellous Medicine. We took inspiration from George’s recipe and created our own concoctions. What would you include in yours?
Things are really hotting up prior to our trip to Pennywell Farm. We read ‘Farmer Duck’ and we pretended to be the animals. Some of us decided to paint farm pictures and we are doing Farmer Duck writing as well. We had to imagine what the characters were thinking.
Which was your favourite character in the story?
We took to writing on the tables to describe our trolls body parts, today. See if you can spot some disgusting, snot filled descriptions!
We’ve been practising writing our tricky words. Look at all our hard work. We’re even doing our best to make the letters sit correctly on the lines.
We practised reading them too.
Which tricky words can you write?
Today we used “colourful semantics” cards to help us learn about different word types. We then had our first go at improving a boring sentence using our new knowledge.
Ben the Bear had a fantastic first weekend at home this week – read his diary to find out more about what he got up to!
This year, the children are going to be getting to grips the marking behind the Big Write. Working in partners, the children will be able to identify the amazing parts and their areas for development. Today the children had their first go, here is a few pictures to show you what they got up to.
Look at this amazing writing! We wrote about our favourite things at Pennywell Farm.
We are getting very good at spelling tricky words and using them in our writing. We can use the digraphs we have learnt and are even having a go at joining some of the letters.
Which tricky words can you spell?
Foundation had fun writing tricky words in glitter using ‘magic’ feathers. We are all getting brilliant at recognising tricky words.
Can you be a tricky word detective this weekend?
This morning Monkey Puzzle are working hard to complete their Top Ten animal fact books that they have been creating this half term. Some fantastic art work is being finished off alongside some great factual information!
We can’t wait to see the finished results!
Today we watched a clip of a fantasy setting to inspire us to write descriptively. We gathered vocabulary and descriptive phrases to describe the vibrant setting. Furthermore, we considered the emotions of the characters and came up with phrases such as ‘shivers rushed down her spine.’
Children then used their ideas to write independent sentences about the setting
Please read the examples… They will help with the home learning ?
Using videos and pictures of fantasy settings, we have been finding synonyms using thesauri and iPads to improve our vocabulary choices.
We also generated similes and metaphors to describe the settings.
What was your favourite word or phrase you came up with today?
Today, we learnt about different features of a diary and began to write a diary entry as an animal in the zoo (orangutan). We wrote in the first person and included:
- commas to mark clauses
- brackets
- apostrophe for contraction
- exclamation marks
- capitalisation for emphasis
- sarcasm
- allitteration
Check out our fantastic writing below:
Do you know what makes a letter successful? Palm Class have been finding out…
We identified the address of the person sending the letter, was at the top of the paper. We found the name of the person who the letter was for, was also near the top of the letter and the person who sent it, had written their name at the bottom.
Palm Class also discovered an introduction and conclusion to the letter, some subordinating conjunctions, expanded noun phrases, capital letters, full stops and paragraphs!
We will be applying all of these features into our own letters, when we write to Mr Grinling to help him keep those pesky seagulls away!
Monkey Puzzle have been journaling and reflecting on all their learning in SOLE….They have all presented their work differently and I have been incredibly impressed with their imagination and enthusiasm on their reflections and presentation. Could you think of where you could use this journaling skill at home?