Category Archives: Literacy

500 Words Competition

April 19, 2016 User deactivated Leave a comment

Recently, I entered the BBC2 Radio 500 Words Competition. It’s a story writing competition where you write a short story less than 500 words and submit it online. Each year, there are over 900,00 entries! Only 3,000 stories were chosen to go to the second stage. Guess what? My story “Inevitable” was chosen!

One of the judges you may recognise is Francesca Simon, the author of Horrid Henry books.

If you are one out of 50 people who get chosen for the third stage, you get your story on the 500 Words Website. You also get 2 tickets to the finals in London. ( They also pay for your hotel! Wow! )

In the last stage, there are three finalists! 3rd place receives their own height in books! ( that’s 5ft!) 2nd place receives Alex Jones’ height in books, and 1st place receives Chris Evan’s height in books and 500 books for the school library!

If you’d like to read my story , ” Inevitable ” please scroll down.

Art, bootcamp, IDL, Literacy

Future Me!

September 26, 2015 User deactivated 10 Comments

Primary 7 have recently completed artwork and writing on the topic ‘Future Me’.

Budding Artists

At the start of term, we began by sketching to create half of a self portrait. We have slowly improved on our observation skills throughout the making. We used mirrors to observe every detail from above our shoulders and have focused on key parts of our faces to make it as realistic as possible.

The other half of the face was much trickier! We had to imagine what we might look like in the future, in the year 2035. The illustrations also included some ideas of what we want to be like in the future. For example, I drew some sports equipment as I would like to be either a PE teacher or an Active Schools Coordinator and Conor drew some dinosaur bones as his dream career is in Palaeontology. The finished designs are really brilliant! Some of the class look quite different in their projections of themselves in 20 years! Each one gives a really good insight into their future hopes and dreams.

Dear Future Self
During our writing lesson, we wrote an inspirational letter to our future selves so that in twenty years we can look back at them to see what goals we have achieved. First, we brainstormed ideas and advice we would like to add to our letter to make sure it was filled with information, advice and questions. It is a lot more complicated than a regular piece of writing as addressing yourself in the future is tricky! Everyone’s letter included; advice to themselves, their future career expectations and any goals or hopes and dreams they wanted to fulfil.

We have created a display of our observational drawings and letters so that any visitors to our classroom can see the finished product!We thought of some qualities and skills we wanted our future self to have and arranged these words around our hard work. On Monday, we had some International delegates visit the school and they had some positive feedback to give about our work.

All together, everyone enjoyed the task – especially drawing the portraits! We hope everyone keeps their letters safe so we can look back in 20 years and see how far we have come!

Orla and Conor, P7

bootcamp, Health and Wellbeing, Literacy

A Recipe For Success

August 31, 2015 User deactivated 4 Comments

We are P7 pupils from Gourock Primary School. We took part in the Blogging Bootcamp last year and we are looking forward to participating again and taking part in new challenges this upcoming year.

Primary seven is a big year for us because we are getting ready for moving up to the high school, which means we need to push ourselves to our limits and ‘take every opportunity’, which is our class motto!

We have been looking at poetry and figurative language and decided the best way to introduce ourselves was through a ‘Recipe for Success’.

We have used alliteration in our recipe to make it sound more interesting. We hope you enjoy it!

Matthew Orr.

Literacy

An Unwelcome Visitor

December 17, 2014 Mrs Falconer 11 Comments

Primary 6 have been hard at work…

We are about to become published authors! Our Book Launch day is planned and we can’t wait to share our successes with a wider audience, including our proud families.

Creating a Character
Someone you can be scared of…
We planned out a descriptive paragraph, identifying this dangerous character. We looked at adjectives and descriptive phrases. We considered what our character might look like, sound like, what they might wear, why they are wicked and what their likes and dislikes could be.

After reading our class novel ‘Street Child’ and finding lots of good similes and metaphors, we decided that one way to make this paragraph really successful would be to include a simile about the eyes. We spoke of the popular saying ‘eyes are the window to the soul’ and thought of different ways to write about a person’s eyes that would suggest that not all was well with them, that they shouldn’t be trusted…

Here are a selection:

Eve – ‘Her eyes were brewing like a storm and a crooked smile was plastered over her face.’

Libby – ‘His eyes were as dark as a cold, winter’s night.’

There’s only one way to really bring a character to life…

CREATE!

After deciding on our character, we concentrated on good story openings. We looked at ways in which authors ‘pull their readers in’ to their story. Our imaginative story had to have two good beginnings as it featured a parallel universe.

Here are just a couple of our wonderful examples:

Illustrations
We’ve been really enjoying our time with our P2 shared reading buddies. Looking at different types of picture books has made us appreciate how valuable an illustration can be to enhance a story. So we set to work…

Editing and Redrafting
We were quick to find out that one of the trickiest things about being an author is perseverance – having the patience to edit and redraft, making the story the very best it could be.

The Blurb
The back of the book description.
The dust-cover copy.
Whatever you call your summary of the story, it’s an important element of your book – everyone needs a blurb!

Dedications
The most special part of this whole experience was deciding who to gift our book to.

Part of the writing process was adding our dedication. We have each chosen a younger child (for some it is a family member, for others a close friend or our reading buddy) and we have written them into our stories as one of the main characters!

We think this personal element will really make our books a gift to treasure and we can’t wait to wrap them and put them under a Christmas tree, ready for opening on Christmas morning!

****BOOK LAUNCH UPDATE ****
What a lovely morning we had! Lots of our families turned up to enjoy a hot cup of tea/coffee and enjoy our books.

After some very confident introductions from a selection of classmates; parents, grandparents, friends and members of Gourock Primary read, appreciated and commented on our fabulous stories!