Class News
Introducing WOW Work
In our first newsletter of each term, parents receive a term overview regarding the topics that each class will be covering across the term. However, as part of our School Improvement Plan (SIP) for 2021, Kindergarten to Year 6 are making a major focus of improving their writing.
In order for you to see what we are working on in our classrooms, our class news for the rest of this and each subsequent newsletter has become our WOW work (Working On Writing).
Each fortnight, each teacher will add a short statement about what the class has been working on, which may include structured writing, using descriptive language, adding grammatical features, generating ideas, editing, etc. and will include 3 work samples to illustrate this work.
We look forward to being able to share the amazing work each class is doing.
Kindergarten
Kindergarten are learning to write letter shapes as we learn to name the letter and the sound it makes. Each letter has its own cue eg. 'm' is: 'one short stroke down, back up, a bump and a bump.'
The focus at this early stage is on correct pencil grip. The tripod grasp is the one we use. The pencil is held with thumb and index fingertips and rests on the middle finger. The other two fingers are curled.
We use a crossover pencil grip at school to teach correct grip.
An alternative, if you don't have a pencil grip, is to have your child hold a cotton wool ball or similar object in their hand while they write. This will make the fingers curl under.
Some suggestions to develop Fine Motor Skills for writing are: playdough, construction toys that click together, clipping pegs, using nuts and bolts, doing up buttons and zips and screwing and unscrewing jar lids. Of course, there are many others.
We are experimenting with writing during our play sessions as well as doing more explicit learning tasks. Some examples are included.
Year 1
This term Yr 1 are learning about the structure of informative texts. We have learnt that labelled diagrams often feature in an information report. Here are some samples of work where the children drew their own diagram of one of our classroom chicks, and labelled it using descriptive language. The children have experimented with similes to describe features of the chicks and they have made good attempts at independently spelling unfamiliar words. Great work!
Year 2
This term Year 2 are learning how to write recounts. These are examples of orientations for a book recount. The children had to mention who, when, where, and why.
Year 3
Year 3 has been working on expanding our ideas by using descriptive language. Last week, we completed a ‘Sentence Building’ activity. We started with a very simple sentence and added one small detail to the sentence five different times until we had created a much more complex and interesting sentence. See attached example. Yesterday, we completed an activity by describing some everyday objects in the classroom to make them sound more exciting. See attached examples.
Year 4
In Year 4 we are developing our skills in Narrative Writing. We have been studying descriptive language and have observed, in various stories, how description allows us to paint a picture of the scene in our imagination. With that in mind, we have been using stimulus pictures and writing colourful descriptions of the images depicted.
One picture we used was of a boy in the desert and we wrote descriptively to express our perceptions of the scene. We initially listed all the nouns we could see in the picture and the used adjectives to enhance our writing. Here are three examples:
Year 5/6
In the last 2 weeks, Year 5 and 6 have been working on using an image to generate ideas by annotating aspects of the image that could be seen, heard, felt, smelt and potentially tasted before writing. We have colour coded our thoughts according to the set success criteria which was to use the 5 senses. Check out these amazing examples.
