Reading into Writing: Blog items
Year 5 - Reading into writing - Oracy
Date: 30th Mar 2026 @ 5:21pm
Today in Year 5, we focused on developing our cognitive skills as part of our Oracy Voice 21 work. We began by recapping our physical oracy skills while reading cinquain poems, which we are exploring as part of our reading‑into‑writing sequence. After this, we moved on to our cognitive skills by creating a one‑minute elevator pitch.
We discussed how to construct a persuasive argument and considered what we might say if we had the chance to speak to Miss Moyes. The children thought carefully about strong points they could make, using clear reasoning and justification to support their ideas.
Date: 27th Mar 2026 @ 3:40pm
🌟 Spelling Bee Success! 🐝📚
Today, our school was buzzing with excitement as children from Year 2 to Year 6 took part in our annual Spelling Bee! 🏆✨
Over the past few weeks, pupils have been working incredibly hard to learn their spellings. From tricky letter blends to confident articulation, they have shown real dedication. 💪🧠
When the moment arrived, each participant demonstrated remarkable resilience and courage. Taking the stage in front of the whole school is no small task, yet our spellers stood tall, spoke clearly, and gave it their very best. 🎤👏
We are incredibly proud of every child who took part. Their effort, determination, and enthusiasm made today a wonderful celebration of learning. 🎉📖
A huge well done to all our super spellers! 🌈⭐
🌟 Year 3 Spelling Bee Success! 🌟
Date: 27th Mar 2026 @ 1:56pm
This morning, a wonderful selection of our Year 3 children took part in an exciting Spelling Bee, and what a fantastic event it turned out to be! Each participant was challenged to learn a set of spellings in preparation for the competition, representing their house teams with enthusiasm and determination.
From the very first round, the children showed impressive recall, confidence, and teamwork. Their hard work at home and in school really shone through, and they demonstrated brilliant focus under pressure. It was clear to everyone watching just how committed they were to doing their very best.
Date: 25th Mar 2026 @ 4:07pm
This week in Year 4, we have been continuing our work on blog writing—and this time, we teamed up! Pupils paired up for a shared write, helping each other plan, draft, and edit their ideas. Working collaboratively allowed them to discuss vocabulary choices, check each other’s punctuation, and think carefully about how to make their writing engaging for an online audience.
Throughout this half term, the children have been learning what makes an effective blog, from using a clear structure and interesting details to writing in a friendly, informative style. Last week, they applied these skills by writing about our exciting Science Day, capturing their favourite experiments, activities, and discoveries.
This week’s shared write gave pupils the chance to revisit that event and refine their blogs even further. They supported each other brilliantly and produced some fantastic pieces of writing.
Year 5 - Reading into Writing - Fable Writing
Date: 25th Mar 2026 @ 12:26pm
Year 1- The disgusting Sandwich
Date: 23rd Mar 2026 @ 7:58am
Over the next two weeks, Year 1 will be focusing on the wonderfully funny—and delightfully yucky—story The Disgusting Sandwich by Gareth Edwards and Hannah Shaw. The children will explore the adventures of the hungry badger and the sandwich that will become progressively more and more… disgusting!
Throughout our learning journey, the children will sequence the key events of the story, using pictures and simple sentences to help them understand how the sandwich will change along the way. They will also practise retelling the story in their own words, building their confidence in speaking, listening, and expressive language.
After that, Year 1 will step into the role of real instruction writers. They will learn all about imperative verbs—those bossy words that tell us what to do—and then use them to create their very own set of instructions on how to make a truly disgusting sandwich. From “squash it,” to “drop it,” to “mix in the mud,” we can’t wait to see the imaginative creations they will come up with.
It will be a fantastic learning journey, and we know the children’s enthusiasm will shine through. Stay tuned to discover what will make their sandwiches so deliciously dreadful!
Date: 10th Mar 2026 @ 3:42pm
📚 This half term, we have been developing our narrative writing skills by creating our own stories inspired by Rock, Paper, Scissors.
🎬 To begin, we watched a short silent film that introduced us to the three main characters—Rock, Paper, and Scissors. Without dialogue, we had to pay close attention to their actions, expressions, and interactions to understand the emotions and relationships portrayed in the video.
🧠 As a class, we discussed what we thought the characters were feeling, why certain events happened, and how their personalities could be shown through descriptive writing. We also explored how music, movement, and timing in the video helped build tension and atmosphere.
✍️ Using the film as our inspiration, we planned and wrote our own narrative version of the story. We focused on developing:
- 🌟 Strong character descriptions
- 🌈 Detailed settings
- ⚡ Powerful verbs and figurative language
- 📖 Clear story structure with a beginning, build-up, conflict, and resolution
🖊️ Each pupil then drafted their story, edited it carefully, and created a polished final version. We are extremely proud of the creativity, imagination, and effort shown in every piece.
🌟 Have a read through some of our fantastic stories and see how we brought the characters of Rock, Paper, and Scissors to life!
Date: 10th Mar 2026 @ 2:28pm
Over the next couple of weeks, our focused book is 'Supertato'. This week, we have began to explore the new areas, retold the story of Supertato using items on the storytelling table and sequenced the story accurately. Throughout the next couple of weeks, we will continue to explore the story and describe the characters from the story.
Date: 9th Mar 2026 @ 7:56pm
As part of our topic 'Let#s go Wild' we have be describing animals using a range of vocabularly in our oracy lessons. Firstly we ensured we could name all the different animals and then bagan to explore their different features.
"The tiger is stripey" Cherry
"Elephants have a long trunk and big ears" Noah
"Giraffes have a long neck" Leena
We practiced building our own sentences using the widgets as a prompt. Some of use even used adjectives and the conjunction and to extend our sentences further. To help use reinforce our learning we drew, painted and created our own animals in the classroom provision. We then used our phonic knowledge to add labels and begin to write simple sentences on our own.
Date: 5th Mar 2026 @ 5:01pm
Today, we celebrated World book day by dressing up as characters from our favourite books. Once we returned from assembly we did a circle time in class to tell our friends who we dressed up as and why we had chosen that character. Then, we drew our characters and used descriptive language to describe them. Throughout the day, we have enjoyed completing reading challenges, participating in quizzes and doing reading themed activities. Well done Year 1- you all looked amazing!
Date: 5th Mar 2026 @ 1:50pm
Year 5 celebrated World Book Day in style with a fantastic day full of books, creativity and fun. The children came to school dressed as their favourite book characters, showing off a wonderful range of imaginative costumes inspired by stories they love.
They took part in an exciting assembly where everyone celebrated the joy of reading together. The pupils also tested their book knowledge by taking part in a fun and challenging book quiz.
One of the highlights of the day was a live session with Cressida Cowell, the author of the How to Train Your Dragon series. During the session, the children learned more about the book, discovered how the story and characters were created, and even had the opportunity to learn how to draw some of the characters.
Date: 5th Mar 2026 @ 1:45pm
This morning we took part in a ‘What am I?’ themed world book day quiz. We then created our own riddles for our characters. We then looked at what makes a good book cover and we created our own. Finally, we made bookmarks for our reading books. We enjoyed listening to lots of stories today and we loved dressing up!
Year 3 Celebrate World Book Day 2026!
Date: 5th Mar 2026 @ 11:48am
What an incredible World Book Day we have had in Year 3! Mrs Rose and Miss Edge (also known today as Snow White and Happy!) were absolutely amazed by the creativity and effort the children put into their outfits as they welcomed the children into the classroom. Our classrooms were filled with a magical mix of characters, from Willy Wonka and Where's Wally to Dorothy from Oz, a Roman soldier, Matilda, Disney princesses, action heroes, Mr Men characters, Harry Potter, Darth Vader and even some brilliant David Walliams characters. We began our day with a whole‑school assembly, thinking about what we find fun and how reading can bring joy, imagination and excitement into everyday life.
After assembly, we had the fantastic opportunity to join V&A Schools Live: Primary Read and Draw-Along webinar. We listened to the wonderful Cressida Cowell, who shared how she carefully planned her How to Train Your Dragon series from the very beginning, using meticulous notes and ideas to build her world. She also read from her collection, transporting us into the adventures of Hiccup and Toothless. The children especially loved the step-by-step draw‑along where they created their very own illustration of Hiccup. It was a brilliant experience that inspired creativity, storytelling and a deeper love of reading across the year group.
Year 5 - Characterising speech in Reading into Writing
Date: 4th Mar 2026 @ 11:41am
Today in Year 5, we explored how to characterise speech. The children imagined what a bear might say in different situations and then enriched their dialogue by adding emotion, actions and thoughts to bring the character to life.
They carefully considered how the bear was feeling and showed this through expressive word choices, detailed action beats and insightful inner thoughts. It was wonderful to see how confidently they applied skills from previous lessons, including the use of fronted adverbials to add variety and detail to their sentences. They also demonstrated a secure understanding of how to punctuate direct speech accurately.
The children will then apply this to their fable planning later in the unit.
Date: 27th Feb 2026 @ 7:30am
The first book we have explored in Year One this half term is Monkey Puzzle. After we had read the book, we thought about who the main characters are, what the book is about and where the story was set. Then, we used our knowledge to sequence pictures from the book and match the correct sentences to the picture. Yesterday, we began to retell the story in our own words and have enjoyed exploring the Monkey Puzzle themed provision around the classroom!
Date: 26th Feb 2026 @ 10:09am
As part of our new Reading into Writing Journey, we are looking at fables. Some children in Year 5 have taken their WAGOLL immersion to the next level and, taking the features which they have identified, have improved a WAGOLL which had missing features. This lesson also involoved some more complicated Computing skills as they had to edit an existing document, spell check and correct the formatting as well as improve the text itself! Well done Year 5!
Year 6 - Letters of persuasion
Date: 23rd Feb 2026 @ 4:38pm
Year 6 Begin Their Persuasive Writing Journey!
This week, Year 6 have embarked on an exciting new writing adventure: letters of persuasion! Our mission is to learn how to write confidently and convincingly—just like real campaigners, activists, and opinion leaders.
To kick things off, we explored a WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like). By reading it carefully, we pulled out all the key features that make persuasive letters so powerful. We spotted things like:
- Strong opening statements
- Clear arguments backed up with evidence
- Emotive language to make the reader care
- Rhetorical questions that make you stop and think
- Powerful conclusions that leave a lasting impression
Once we understood what makes a persuasive letter successful, we moved on to reading a range of other examples. This helped us build a toolkit of useful stock phrases, such as:
- “Surely you agree that…”
- “It is essential that…”
- “Have you ever considered…?”
- “Without immediate action…”
We also learned how important it is to use the right register—that means choosing words and tone that suit the audience. Whether we’re writing to a headteacher, a local councillor, or even a famous figure, we now know how to sound polite, confident, and persuasive.
Year 6 are already showing fantastic promise, and we can’t wait to see the brilliant letters they produce next. Watch this space for updates on our writing journey!
Date: 23rd Feb 2026 @ 12:19pm
Date: 20th Feb 2026 @ 4:22pm
During phonics this half term we have been busy learning our phase 3 digraphs. We have taken part in our daily phonics session where we have been recognising, reading and writing new words and phrases. During provision time we have been practicing our reading and writing skills and developing our independance when segmenting and blending words with phase 3 digraphs and trigraphs.
Date: 10th Feb 2026 @ 3:05pm
Year 6 Write Powerful Lindisfarne Monologues
This week, Year 6 have been learning about the Viking attack on Lindisfarne in 793 AD. To help them understand what it might have felt like, the children wrote monologues from the point of view of a monk living in the monastery.
✍️ What We Did
The class learned about:
- What life was like for monks
- How the Vikings arrived on longships
- Why the attack was so shocking
- How to show a character’s thoughts and feelings in writing
After this, the children imagined they were monks and wrote their own monologues describing the terrifying moment the Vikings arrived.
🌟 What We’re Proud Of
The monologues were:
- Detailed – with great descriptions of sounds, sights, and emotions
- Creative – many children used strong vocabulary and dramatic language
- Thoughtful – the writing showed real understanding of how the monks might have felt
Year 6 worked extremely hard and produced some fantastic pieces of writing!
Date: 7th Feb 2026 @ 7:39am
Year 3 Dive into Imagination with Author Dan Worsley
Our Year 3 students were treated to an unforgettable morning when the amazing author Dan Worsley visited to deliver one of his high‑energy storytelling workshops. From the moment he began, Dan’s animated style had every child completely hooked.
With his trademark enthusiasm, Dan transported the children straight to a mysterious, litter‑strewn beach. There, looming among the piles of rubbish, was a bizarre sea creature like no other. The children gasped as they imagined it's eight long, thick tentacles, crooked, jagged teeth, and a circular,red eye capable of shooting a laser beam. This strange creature devoured every scrap of rubbish it could find—but despite his helpful intentions, he accidentally frightened the local people, who chased him away. Without their unexpected helper, the rubbish quickly began to pile up again…
Dan’s storytelling not only captured the children's imaginations but inspired them to create worlds of their own. After the tale, the Year 3 pupils set to work sketching their own unique sea creatures, each more inventive than the last. They eagerly described what their creatures looked like, how they behaved, and what magical or monstrous abilities they possessed.
The classroom buzzed with creativity, laughter, and excitement. It was clear the children thoroughly enjoyed every moment of their workshop. Many left still chatting animatedly about their creatures—and they absolutely cannot wait for Dan Worsley’s next visit.
A huge thank you to Dan for igniting such imaginative thinking. We’re already looking forward to the next adventure!
Date: 6th Feb 2026 @ 4:03pm
We have been reading the story Lost and Found about a little boy and a penguin.To his surprise, the boy finds a penguin standing outside his door, and assumes the penguin must be lost. The boy is determined to help this sad and lonely visitor and sets off on an epic quest to help the penguin get back home.
Take a look at how we painted and collaged a penguin and wrote words about the story and it's characters.
Year 4 - R.A.P. with Alim Kamara
Date: 4th Feb 2026 @ 4:26pm
As part of National Storytelling Week 2026, our Year 4 pupils enjoyed an inspiring online workshop led by storyteller and rapper Alim Kamara. The session, delivered live via Zoom, was a vibrant celebration of music, rhythm and the power of storytelling.
The workshop formed part of the National Literacy Trust’s nationwide events for Key Stage 2, designed to help children explore how stories can be told through sound, lyrics and performance. During the interactive session, pupils learned how storytelling and rap can come together to create powerful narratives. They were guided through the process of shaping their own lyrics and experimenting with rhythm—discovering firsthand how words can come alive through music.
The event formed part of this year’s national theme, “Soundtrack Your Story”, celebrating how music can enhance storytelling and ignite children’s love for reading and writing. Supported by the National Literacy Trust and the National Year of Reading 2026, the workshop provided a rich opportunity for pupils to develop their confidence, creativity and enjoyment of literacy.
Date: 3rd Feb 2026 @ 4:23pm
Year 5 have moved on to exploring persuasive advertisements. They have applied their prior learning from persuasive arguments to the context of advertising. As a class, we have identified the similarities and differences between persuasive writing and advertisements, and have analysed the key features of a persuasive leaflet designed to encourage people to visit York. Pupils have examined how the features are used to influence the reader. Next, we will explore a range of other persuasive adverts to compare techniques and deepen understanding.
