War Horse

To begin our work about War Horse we first looked at the front covers, there are so many. Enough for us to choose one each to try and replicate. We love how they look on our display.

Once we had completed our art we read the blurb and authors note to write detailed predictions.

Chapter 1

We had chapter 1 and started developing our character list. We had a discussion in two groups to gain a deeper upstanding of the text.

Chapter 1-4

As we have continued to read further in to the book. We worked in teams to plan a story map for each chapter. We are developing the use of vocabulary to write a summary of the chapters.

Chapter Summaries 1-4

Using our chapter maps that we’d created in teams we wrote our own personal summaries.

Afro the next few days we continued to read more chapters and follow our narrator Joey through his military training and what new characters he came across. We also used our dictionaries to identify definitions of unfamiliar works and then created a glossary of military terms. 

We read eagerly the first battle that Joey is part of and were shocked to learn that his rider didn’t make it. This was what we used as our stimulus for our writing from a different viewpoint.

This week our focus was single-clause and multi-clause sentences. We learnt about different reasons why authors use sentences that vary in length and that multi-clause sentence give more description but single-clause are used more for impact. 

Using what we have learnt it was time to apply that to our writing. We spent time planning our character descriptions by creating a poster about our chosen character.

Chapter 14 and 15

We read more of the story and got to a part where there was lots of dialogue. We learnt about the difference between informal and formal register and then completed some activities to make sure we had a clear understanding about it.

We split in to two groups; Germans and British. We wrote an informal script to act out to try to lure Joey to our side of no mans land. Have a listen to see if you can spot our contractions, question tags and slang words to make it sound clearly informal.

We recapped what we had learnt about formal and informal language and this time we were independently writing in a formal register in the role of a 'Trooper' to inform our superior; Major Black about the event.

We are so invested in this story that we even read through part of our lunch time to finish a chapter. We were elated to find that Albert and Joey found themselves together again. We realise there are lots of different people who have a claim to Joey and so in pairs we chose a different character to debate.

We watched clips from the film and the stage adaptations of the book. It was interesting to see the different advantages and challenges involved.