Marvellous Minibeasts

Our writing focus was 'Celebrations', to tie in with our topic. Some of the writing was independent and other pieces were quite heavily supported, to encourage the use of phonetic knowledge. The children were encouraged to use capital letters at the beginning of a sentence and full stops at the end. We were also working on using finger spaces in between words, to make our writing more ledgible.

Perfect Penguins

During Autumn term 2, Perfect Penguins wrote in a variety of different genres based on our topic "Ancient Egypt."

The children showed off their knowledge of adjectives when creating a character description of Cleopatra. 

The children's imaginative side really showed through when they created a 3-part story based on the Indiana Jones stories. 

They created great adventure stories describing the problems that "Tad Jones" faced when on his search for Pharoah Zosa's lost treasure. 

Cheeky Chimps

In Autumn Term 2, the Cheeky Chimps continued their class book – Letters from the Lighthouse.

The children really enjoyed looking at how different characters empathise with a pilot who was involved in a plane crash. They were able to think about how the pilot was treated by different characters and discuss their own opinions regarding this.  We wrote journalistic accounts of the plane and then had a class debate to see what we would do in the same situation. The children were absolutely fantastic at getting their point across but were also extremely understanding of other children’s’ opinions.

We then focused on a boat trip that occurs between France and England. The story didn’t go in to too much detail about the actual journey so we thought about what it would be like to be on that boat and what would have happened if a storm occurred. We concentrated on figurative language and how our vocabulary can improve our writing. We then wrote a description about the storm.

The Cheeky Chimps were extremely excited to reach the last few chapters of the book and finally begin to put all the pieces together. There were certainly some surprises that the children didn’t expect or hadn’t predicted throughout reading the story. We enjoyed our writing activities once we had finished the book as we wrote reviews and recommendations for other children and we also wrote the next chapter of the story and predicted what we thought might have happened to all the characters after a given time.