English

Instructions: Art ideas

This half term we are basing our work on this book. So far we have identified the main features of instructions, learned about how time adverbs and imperative verbs can add detail to instructions, and have had a go at giving and following verbal instructions with our partners to create drawings. 
Today, we were given different versions of the same instructions to create a wax resist landscape scene. In pairs, we followed the instructions as best we could. We then came together to evaluate each set of instructions and chose aspects were the most helpful from each.

Contrast poetry

This half term we have been reading The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. This week, having read the section of the story where Edward is trapped on a rubbish dump in a landfill for months on end, we considered his experience using sensory description and used this to create lines of poetry on purple strips. We then created positive sensory memories and thoughts which Edward may have experienced earlier in the story and wrote these on orange strips. Working with partners, we explored how changing the order of the lines, pairing or grouping lines in different ways or beginning with different coloured strips impacted the overall feeling of the poems. Once we were happy with our order we read them aloud and redrafted them as a final piece of flashback poetry. Some chose to keep the line structure and others chose to write it as a broken narrative to reflect Edward’s perspective.

Each week, we select a phoneme or grapheme to use as a focus for our handwriting, to make sure we are regularly using our sounds for reading and spelling. Today, we used the ou grapheme. We played “Walk it, Talk it, Write it” outside, by running the formation of the sound and using chalk to practise on the playground. We then played partner games to practise our formation and completed a phoneme hunt in a text. 

We read the poem “The Fog” and visualised the fog as a living character using charcoal and sketching pencils. With this as a starting point, we explored poetic features and created our own poetry, using personification to describe different types of weather.