Reading into Writing: Blog items
Date: 11th Dec 2025 @ 12:15pm
This week we have been reading the story Stick Man.
Everyone enjoyed the story about a Stick Man who becames separated from the family home and embarks on an adventure. Finally, he returns home after helping Santa deliver Christmas presents on his sleigh.
"Stick Man was a flag on a sandcastle" Dolcie- Rae
"He nearly got burnt on the fire!" Ava
"Stick Man helped Santa with all the presents" Noah
Date: 10th Dec 2025 @ 7:47pm
🕵️♂️ Our Crime Story Writing Adventure
Over the past couple of weeks, our class has been diving into the world of crime stories. We started by reading lots of different examples—from mysterious robberies to daring escapes—and collected exciting ideas and vocabulary to use in our own writing.
Armed with inspiration, we set out to create our very own crime tales. Some of us imagined robberies in grand mansions, while others wrote about missing laptops or stolen artefacts. We hope you enjoy reading through some of our work below—see if you can spot the clues and solve the mysteries yourself!
Year 1- Letters from the Stick man
Date: 10th Dec 2025 @ 7:24am
The past couple of weeks, Year 1 have been exploring the book 'The stick man'. We have thought about all the adventures he has had and how he has felt at different parts. Today, we wrote a letter from the stick man to his family telling them all about his adventures and how much he misses them.
Date: 5th Dec 2025 @ 10:48am
We have been reading the story The Gingerbreadman.
It is one of our favourite stories and everyone loves joining in saying "Run, run as fast as you can, you can't catch me I'm the Gingerbreadman!".
Everyone collaged and painted a Gingerbreadman, wrote a list of the characters from the story and retold the story at the story telling table.
"Everyone chased the Gingerbreadman" Raya
"They couldn't catch him" Ibrahim
"He was a very fast Gingerbreadman" Harrison- Bleu
"The fox was sneaky- he tricked him and ate him all up!" Bonnie
Date: 4th Dec 2025 @ 9:07am
In today’s Reading into Writing we looked at what a simile was. We started the lesson off by making similes using cards to build our sentences. The children thought carefully about the different qualities and what might it link to.
Date: 1st Dec 2025 @ 6:31pm
Over the next week, Year 1 will be reading the story 'Stickman' and completing lots of different activites relating to this story. Today we began with an oracy session, to learn more about the characters, setting and key vocabulary. We then ordered the story, focusing on the key events and retelling the story with our peers.
Date: 27th Nov 2025 @ 9:56am
In this lesson, children explored oracy skills by immersing themselves in the story Cave Baby. After listening to the book, pupils became different characters from the story, such as Cave Baby, the mammoth, and the parents. They used key phrases from the text alongside their own imaginative ideas to bring the narrative to life through role play. This activity encouraged expressive language, turn-taking, and active listening, while promoting confidence in speaking. By adopting character perspectives, children practiced using tone, gesture, and vocabulary effectively, deepening their understanding of the story and enhancing their ability to communicate creatively.
Date: 27th Nov 2025 @ 9:49am
This week, our children have been developing their Oracy skills, focusing especially on tone and intonation as they read aloud the opening of their own traditional tales. Our new class story is set at Christmas, following a main character who adores the festive season—until a miserable goblin appears, determined to destroy Christmas and dampen their joyful spirit.
As the children shared their stories so far, they experimented with using warm, excited tones to capture the magic of Christmas, then shifted to grumbly, low voices to bring the goblin’s gloomy personality to life. It was wonderful to see them thinking carefully about how their voices can enhance meaning, atmosphere, and character.
The classroom was filled with expression, confidence, and creativity. We can’t wait to continue developing our tales and see how our young storytellers bring their festive adventures to life!
Date: 21st Nov 2025 @ 4:09pm
👨👩👧 Year 6 Together Time
This week, we welcomed our parents and carers into Year 6 for a special Together Time session. It was a fantastic opportunity to share all the hard work we’ve been doing since September.
To make it fun and interactive, we organised a quiz covering everything we’ve learned in class so far. From maths and reading to history and science, the questions gave our families a real taste of the wide range of topics we’ve explored. Everyone joined in with great enthusiasm, and it was brilliant to see parents and carers working alongside us, testing their knowledge and celebrating how much we’ve achieved. The quiz sparked lots of laughter and proud moments, showing just how far we’ve come this term.
Together Time was a wonderful way to connect home and school, and we’re already looking forward to the next chance to share our learning journey.
Date: 21st Nov 2025 @ 4:04pm
🖊️ Exploring ISPACE Openers in Year 6:
This week in Year 6 writing, we have been learning how to make our sentences more exciting and varied by using ISPACE openers. ISPACe stands for Ing, Simile, Preposition, Adverb, Conjunction, Ed, — six different ways to start a sentence. By practising these, we can avoid repeating the same structures and keep our readers hooked.
We’ve also been working on adding detail to our main clauses. Instead of writing short, simple sentences, we’ve been stretching them out with description, action, and atmosphere. This helps us to build a clearer picture in the reader’s mind, which is especially important as we prepare to write our own crime stories.
Year 5 - Reading into Writing - Stories from other Cultures
Date: 20th Nov 2025 @ 10:35am
This week in Year 5, our Reading into Writing journey has taken us on an exciting exploration of stories from another culture. We have been analysing WAGOLLs (What A Good One Looks Like) based on Aboriginal tales, focusing on their unique features, themes, and language. This deep dive is helping us understand how cultural context shapes storytelling and is preparing us to draft and write our own stories inspired by stories in the Dreamtime.
Year 4 - Finding Features in Texts
Date: 20th Nov 2025 @ 8:01am
As part of our 'Reading into Writing' journey, pupils in year 4 have been identifying the features of play scripts. After a class discussion exploring a examplar play script, pupils worked in pairs to identify the features in a range of examples, including extracts from Jack and the Beanstalk and George's Marvellous Medicine. Pupils will now begin to plan, draft and publish their own play script.
Date: 17th Nov 2025 @ 6:19pm
In Year 1 this week we are reading the story 'Leaf Man.' We began the week by unpicking the key vocabulary in the story, learning the meaning of any new words and retelling the key parts of the story. Throughout the week we have then printed our own leaf character and written sentences to describe where our leaf character may travel. We have also completed lots of different activities in our provision, including creading AB patterns, matching numeral to quantity and accurately counting within 10.
Date: 17th Nov 2025 @ 11:55am
We started off the lesson by using our Oracy skills to explain what we could see in pictures from the First World War. Then went on to mind-mapping as many adjectives about the trenches and what is was like living in these horrible conditions. We then used these adjectives to write our own descriptive sentences.
Date: 14th Nov 2025 @ 10:36am
Today, the children celebrated Children in Need. They came to school dressed in something spotty or stripy and donated money to the charity.
In the afternoon, we had a whole school assembly to celebrate this good cause.
Take a look at our photos!
Date: 6th Nov 2025 @ 8:21pm
In our Oracy lesson to start this half term, we looked at Social and Emotional Working with others. We recapped how we show we’re listening and how to take turns appropriately by listening carefully but also responding using our ABC talk tactics. We looked at problems, such as being stranded on an island surrounded by wild animals and we discussed what our solution would be. The children organised themselves into talking trios to discuss these problems and then used the agree, build and challenge stem sentences to support their discussions as a whole group.
Date: 6th Nov 2025 @ 4:03pm
In Redwoods we have been focusing on bonfire night and Diwali this week. We have learnt about this wonderful celebration and its importance within the Sikh and Hindu religion. Together we discussed how this compared to festivals and special times we celebrate. Working in pairs we read instructions on how to make a salt dough Diya lamp. Working tohgether we made the salt dough mixtures measuring the correct amount out before making our Diya lamp shape.
Date: 4th Nov 2025 @ 3:53pm
To begin our half term our focus is Room on the Broom. Over the last two days, we have enjoyed reading the story and discussing the key parts, characters and settings. Yesterday, we sequenced the key events of the story and retold it using key vocabulary and today we focused on writing short captions for characters speech and labelling characters and objects from the story. Over the next week, we will enjoy exploring the areas including themed motor skills tasks, maths tasks and telling stories in our story telling area.
Date: 17th Oct 2025 @ 12:11pm
This half term in Reading into Writing, Year 5 have been exploring biographies! We’ve enjoyed learning about the features of this text type and discovering how writers tell the stories of inspiring people. For our Hot Write, everyone wrote a biography about Bob Marley, showing off everything we’d learned about structuring information, using formal language, and celebrating someone’s achievements.
Date: 16th Oct 2025 @ 9:07am
To celebrate Black History Month, pupils in year 4 have written non-chronological reports about Viv Anderson - the first black person to represent the England senior national football team. Pupils enjoyed finding aout about Viv's early life - his parents were part of the Windrush Generation, who moved to England after World War 2. Here are a few examples of the children's writing.
Date: 13th Oct 2025 @ 5:19pm
This week we have been reading the story 'I want to be a Princess' by Stephanie Taylor. We learnt about Maya, who initially says she wants to be a princess, but then explains she wants to be like Princess Amina, a warrior princess who defended and ruled a kingdom. We then spent some time discussing with our teachers and peers what we would like to be when we grow up and our reasons why. We talked about lots of different careers, including doctors, teachers, ice cream sellers, police officers and builders.
Reception- Sensory Experience: Making Bread like Little Red Hen
Date: 10th Oct 2025 @ 6:18pm
This week some of the children in Reception have been exploring making bread.
They used all their senses to explore the ingredients and had fun feeling the flour, mixing in the water and mark making - we got very messy!
We were also learning to work alongside each other and focus our attention and concentrate during an activity.
Date: 7th Oct 2025 @ 6:34pm
Over this half term, we have been completing lots of tasks in our provision to practise our reading, writing, maths and oracy skills. We have retold stories, represented numbers, ordered numbers, practised number and letter formation and worked on fine motor skills, We have been working on completing these short tasks with increasing independence, to consolidate prior learning.
Date: 6th Oct 2025 @ 12:46pm
Today we held our first Spelling Bee of the year. Each house was represented by the best spellers from Year 2 - Year 6 and the children were tested on spellings they have been learning in Autumn 1. We are very proud of all the children for being their house representative and spelling some very tricky words in front of the whole school. The overall winners were Chepstow, who managed to spell 12/15 spellings across all 5 years groups.
