Spring 1

During this half term, children are reading the book ‘Beowulf’ by Michael Morpurgo. 
Throughout the unit, children have had a chance to write a variety of genres such as setting descriptions, character descriptions, letters and newspaper reports. 

Autumn 2

To begin this half term, our poetry focus was The Highway by Alfred Noyes. Children studied the poem and discussed the poetic devices Alfred used throughout the poem. After completing a comprehension on the poem and understand any unfamiliar language, the children attempted to write a stanza of their own, inspired by The Highwayman. 
Once complete and edited, the children shared their stanza with the rest of the class.

Autumn 1

Our class text this half term is ‘Boy in the Tower’ by Polly Ho Yen. As part of this unit, we are learning how to write a suspense extract and what features the author uses to create suspense. The children analysed extracts from the book and picked out show don’t tell, range of sentence types, dialogue and imagery as features that the author used. Throughout the unit, children will have the chance to practice these features through short burst writing, eventually building up to writing their own suspense extract linked to the book. 
 

To begin the unit, children looked at the front cover and were able to make predictions about the text. We discussed what we could see, any questions we had and what we could infer from the images. 

Persuasive Writing 

As part of our persuasive writing unit, children wrote letters before their final writing task of writing a persuasive travel guide. The children got quite a shock when they saw that their chairs had quit and refused to let the children sit on them. The chairs left a letter explaining that they had had enough of being dragged about, being untucked and some of the smelling crimes that the children commit on the chairs. Without chairs, the children had to write a persuasive letter convincing their chairs to return. Once they had done so, they were pleased to find out the all managed to persuade the chairs to return!