Reading into Writing: Blog items
Date: 11th Jan 2024 @ 4:37pm
After two weeks away over Christmas, pupils in year 5 are back and hard at work improving their reading and reading comprehension skills. As usual, this week pupils have been exploring texts related to our writing journey, Aboriginal Dreamtime Stories from Australia. Pupils read and discuss the text in a small group before answering comprehension questions about what they have read. Other children were working independently on our online resource, 'Reading Plus' - reading different genres of text and answering questions.
Year 4- Finding Features of News Articles
Date: 11th Jan 2024 @ 1:06pm
In Reading into Writing, Year 4 have been identifying structural and language features of newspaper reports and online news articles. Firstly, we looked at some examples of newspaper articles and highlighted the features that we noticed. After this, we used our digital literacy skills to look at some news articles online and were given post it notes to label the features that we found. We will continue to read and annotate a range of news articles and will plan and write our own news article in the next couple of weeks.
Date: 14th Dec 2023 @ 2:54pm
In Reading into Writing we have been looking at shape poems. From our learning of alliteration, similes and metaphors we then applied this to create a bank of phrases and words linking to our christmas theme.
Year 5 - Text Feature Detectives
Date: 12th Dec 2023 @ 9:37am
As our Reading into Writing journey into stories from other cultures continues, pupils were challenged to find structure and language features from a variety of different text. We have been learning about the Australian Aborigional Dreamtime stories, a group of creation stories from their culture. Pupils identified the features before working collaboratively to find them in different stories.
Date: 7th Dec 2023 @ 4:28pm
Year 4 have been focusing on writing playscripts. This week, we have watched a couple of the scenes from Arthur Christmas and have written a film script of these scenes as a class. We have thoroughly enjoyed looking at the main features of play/film scripts and using these in our own shared writing. We look forward to planning and drafting our own film scripts later on this half term.
Date: 7th Dec 2023 @ 1:29pm
Year Two have further been exploring descriptive writing and today focused on describing settings. We used adjectives and adverbs to describe what we could see, hear, smell and imagine what it might feel like. We worked in groups to create a bank of ambitious vocabulary that can help us when we come to write our Christmas story soon.
Year 4- Laurel's Reading Champions
Date: 30th Nov 2023 @ 7:57pm
Well done to our new Reading Champions in Laurel. You have read three times this week and been on Reading Plus for half an hour. Hopefully there will be more pupils in Laurel that can earn their Reading Champion badges! Keep up the good work!
Year 4 - Acting from a filmscript
Date: 30th Nov 2023 @ 10:15am
In Reading into Writing we have been looking at playscripts and filmscripts. Today we had a go at acting out part of the filmscript from Arthur Christmas.
Year 6 - Oak's Reading Champions Library Choices
Date: 28th Nov 2023 @ 11:15am
Here are the books Oak's Reading Champions chose today in the library. We will give feedback on the books once we have finished them. Stay tuned...
Reception There's no such thing as a Gruffalo
Date: 21st Nov 2023 @ 6:13pm
The children in Reception have been reading the story 'The Gruffalo'. They have been using props at the storytelling table to retell the story, using loose parts to make their own Gruffalo models, making repeated patterns using autumnal objects, completing Gruffalo themed maths activities, making lists of the Gruffalo's favourite food and making Gruffalo food outside in the mud kitchen. What a busy week! Have a look at our wonderful learning.
Date: 9th Nov 2023 @ 9:05am
In preparation for Remembrance Day over the weekend, we have been busy doing an art activitiy to make poppy art. We have spoken about why we celebrate Remembrance Day and practise a new medium using clay in art. Year 3 created the background of our clay art using charcoal. We have also been looking at some famous Remembrance poems and some children have used their best handwriting to rewrite them.
Date: 5th Nov 2023 @ 9:53pm
This week Reception have been having a spooky time in class!
We listened to the story Room on the Broom, had fun retelling it at the story table, made repeating patterns on a witches hat, and also using spooky objects, painted pumpkins and spiders and wrote CVC words from the story too.
Ouside the children carved pumpkins and made spooky potions.
Date: 2nd Nov 2023 @ 2:54pm
Our first journey for this half term is writing a character description. Before we begin to plan and write our own, we explored lots of different character descriptions from Roald Dahl's books including: The BFG, Miss Trunchball, Fantastic Mr Fox and Grandma in George's Marvellous medicine. We carefully searched for adjectives and adverbs and recorded them in a grid so we can magpie some idea's for our own and some descriptions even included similes!
Year 4- Laurel's Reading Champions
Date: 30th Oct 2023 @ 7:54pm
Well done to the first Reading Champions in Laurel Class! They have been reading at home at least 3 times a week and accessed Reading Plus for at least 30 minutes. We are excited to see who our next Reading Champions will be.
Date: 19th Oct 2023 @ 4:43pm
On Wednesday morning it was No Pen Day at Boundary. We had a great time in class, learning without using pens and pencils to record our work. For maths, pupils completed a tarsia puzzle, which required them to recall our previous learning and match numbers to Roman numerals. For our Reading into Writing lesson, pupils worked in small groups to build a non-chronological report from different features.
Date: 17th Oct 2023 @ 8:13pm
This half term the children children in Reception have been beginning to learn their phase 2 letter sounds. They have been taking part in a daily phonics session learning four new sounds per week. The children have had lots of opportunities during continuous provision and adult led activities to practices recognising the graphemes, hearing the initial sound in words, orally segmenting simple words and blending sounds to read simple words. It is really important that the children have an opportunity to practice their early reading skills at home by reading their home reading book a minimun of three times per week.
"a a apple" Isla
"m-a-p map" Sid
"t for teddy' Levi
Date: 17th Oct 2023 @ 2:54pm
We've had a great morning in Year 6 with our first 'No Pen' morning of the year. We began with some grammar and punctuation work, where in pairs we picked different cards with tasks on and discussed them together. We then fed back to the class our answers and checked that we were right. Then we moved on to lots of oracy work - this began with asking 'would you rather...' questions to our partners. We had to give reasons for our own choices and listen carefully to our partner's resposnes. If we were picked, we had to give the response our partner gave. We finished the first session with some agree, build on, challenge statements. Again, this gave us lots of opportunities to talk to other children and give justifications for our answers. In Maths, we carried out different activities in the 2 groups, including loops card games, tarsias and orally explaining mistakes in calculations.
Date: 17th Oct 2023 @ 7:59am
Date: 16th Oct 2023 @ 9:54pm
Over the last few weeks, we have been putting all of our States of Matter knowledge together to learn about The Water Cycle. We created a model of the cycle in class then we used our knowledge to write a story about 'Robbie the rainddrop' and his journey around The Water Cycle.
Date: 16th Oct 2023 @ 9:35pm
Over the last couple of weeks, Year 4 have been celebrating Black History Month in our PSHE and Reading into Writing lessons. This year, the main theme of Black History Month is 'Celebrating our Sisters.' Furthermore, our year group focus was sporting achievements. Therefore, in PSHE, we researched a range of Black British Women athletes who have made a significant impact on the sporting industry. We then used this to create our own artwork. This allowed us to discuss key words, such as diversity and culture, and emphasise the importance of appreciating similarities and differences between everyone.
In Reading into Writing, we have been working towards writing a non-chronological report about Lauren James. Firstly, we looked at some existing non-chonological reports about Lauren James before researching interesting facts about her early life and football career, including her biggest achievements. After this, we collated these facts into our own non-chronological reports.
We have found it very interesting to learn about all of the incredible Black British athletes and their amazing achivements and impact they have had on our history.
Date: 11th Oct 2023 @ 7:25pm
This week, we have held our first Spelling Bee of the year. Four children from each year group were selected to represent their house. They were each given three words to spell from our 3/4 statutory spelling words.
We are extremel proud of the children in Year 4 who represented our year group and their houses. They got all of their spellings correct which shows hard work and dedication to learning their spellings. Well done!
Date: 11th Oct 2023 @ 11:49am
We have held our first Spelling Bee of the year and what a wonderful event it was! 4 children in each year group represented their house and were given three words to spell from over a list of 30 possible words. Every child showed courage and determination when it came to spelling their words. It was a very close contest, with Chepstow winning overall with 15 out of 15. We are very proud of all the children who represented their house and are looking forward to the next one.
Year 5 - Biographies for Black History Month
Date: 6th Oct 2023 @ 4:27pm
This week the pupils in year 5 have been using what they have learned to write a biography about a famous black musician. They reseached the musician's family background and their music career, before planning, drafting and editing their writing. Today, pupils wrote their finished biography!
Date: 21st Sep 2023 @ 12:54pm
In Year 6 we have finished our first Reading into Writing journey - explanatory texts. We followed all the stages of the journey:
- Cold write
- Looking at a WAGOLL for features
- Immersion in Reading
- GPS linked to the genre
- Teacher model/Shared write
- Improving a WABOLL
- Plan
- Draft
- Edit
- Hot write
We produced some excellent writing for our first piece in Year 6. Our end piece of writing was to explain how to use a 'Teacher Pleaser' machine. We think our teachers would be very happy if they had a machine like the ones we invented!!
Date: 20th Sep 2023 @ 9:44pm
This week the children listened to the story 'No-Bot The Robot' - a robot who lost his bottom! It is a hilarious adventure about resilience and friendship.
Take a look at the different ways we explored the story through art and design.
"I made a robot with a square body" Mathew.
"My robot has a square head" Esme.
"His friends helped him find his bottom" Summer.
"Hel left it on the swing" George.
