We had a busy start to the week in our Literacy today with a specific focus on using connectives to make our sentences more detailed.

First, we worked together to read a passage and identify any connectives that we could see. These included ‘however, as well as, in addition, consequently, thus and because.’

We then applied our knowledge that a conjunction is a part of speech that connects words, phrases, or clauses that are called the conjuncts of the conjunctions to up level sentences in our literacy jotters.

Grammar Monday’s could be our new favourite thing!

Today we were very busy in class working on our Factual Report Writing. We spent time finding out different facts about Christmas traditions and how it is celebrated around the world.

Throughout the lesson, excellent growth mindset was on display with the class wanting to go over and above their group targets and add more information to their reports.

We felt confident when reading a passage and identifying which statements were facts and which were opinions and were all very proud of our final pieces of work.

In our writing, 6.22 have been focusing on learning about the difference between a fact and an opinion.

A fact is a statement that can be proven or checked, while an opinion is a statement that tells what a person thinks, feels, or believes and cannot be proven.

We learnt that authors or writers usually give their opinion on a topic and back it up with facts, this makes their argument more convincing.

We spent our lesson researching facts about our favourite animal and then presenting these in a short factual report.

To achieve our learning intention we ensured that our reports had: a title, an introduction, sub-headings and different paragraphs each with a different focus.

This term, we have been creating our own imaginative novels on Book Creator. Today in our literacy lesson, we planned, researched and wrote our own blurbs for our stories.

We learnt that blurbs:

• Are short in length
• Introduce a main character, the story and the theme
• Use attention-grabbing words and phrases
• Use an ellipsis at the end to leave the reader asking questions…
• Often have book reviews/star ratings on them

Now, we are able to transfer our blurbs onto our digital book creator app. We can’t wait to share them soon!

Today in 6.22, we finished our first class novel – the Girl of Ink and Stars. We all agreed that it was a beautifully written and lyrical story of friendship, discovery, myths and magic, with lots of twists, turns and adventure.

We then spent time writing a book review, summarising our thoughts, highlights and the plot of the novel. We even gave it a star rating out of 5!

We enjoyed the story which followed Isabella, a young girl who was forbidden from leaving her island and who dreamt of the faraway lands her father once mapped. When her closest friend disappears into the island’s Forgotten Territories, she volunteers to guide the search. As a cartographer’s daughter, she’s equipped with elaborate ink maps and knowledge of the stars, and is eager to navigate the island’s forgotten heart.

The class have all contributed daily to reading the novel aloud and completing comprehension questions, there has been great progress in these areas throughout our weeks at school.

On Remembrance Day this week our class took a closer look at some famous poetry, namely the well known ‘Flanders Field’ poem by John McCrae, who was an army doctor, in 1915 during the First World War.

Flanders Fields is a name given to several First World War battlegrounds which were situated near the border of France and Belgium. The battles which created Flanders Fields began in August 1914, when Germany invaded Belgium.

Through our analysis of the poem, we learnt when the land began to recover after the war and the grass and flowers returned, poppies became a symbol of remembrance!

In literacy we have been working on our own project in school and at home – creating our very own novels on Book Creator! As a class we love imaginative writing and were excited to write our very own story. The class has chosen a wide range of genres including adventure, comedy, action, horror and sports.

Before we began writing we looked at the important features of a beginning, middle and end to a story.  We worked together on identifying the who, where, when and what for our opening chapter. Then we moved onto planning the build up/dilemma of a story should which needed to build up a sense of excitement that something is going to happen, create a challenging problem and eventually have a resolution. Lastly, we decided if our story would end on a cliff-hanger, with a twist or a happy ending. 

Using the chromebooks, we then designed the front cover of our novel and uploaded it onto our class library.

We will continue to work on our novels this term and we are very excited to share our different stories soon!