Our Learning > Our Classes

 

We are creative writers

This year, we started our writing journey off by looking at a childhood classic- Where the Wild things are by Maurice Sendak.

Using the text, we explored how the character Max might be feeling and recorded different viewpoints using our inference skills

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“I really liked when we did where the wild things are. At the start, we read the book but it didn’t have a lot of words in it- it was mostly pictures and not a lot of detail. So we decided to write our own to make it even better” -Alaia.

From this, we then put our ideas together to create a diary entry with a focus on using effective time adverbials and detailed descriptions.

 

Moving on from this, we decided to really think about writing for an audience, rather than listing ‘key words’. Here we decided to use Max’s imagination to help us to create our own ‘Wild Environment’ based on the five senses, deeper shades of meaning (vocabulary) and prepositions.

This also helped us for when we were artists as we then turned our vocabulary into a visual representation for an audience.

                 

“I really like when we did Where The Wild Things Are. When we read the book there were barely any words and there were more pictures than words and everyone had to use a good use of vocabulary for the scene in the forest.” -Ava

 

We are reporters

In previous years, Year 6 have used Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide as a stimulus for writing. We have always admired these displays and wanted to have a go at making our own.

To begin, we used many extracts from the Field Guide to help us to see how reports can be presented. This ranged from looking at Cockatrices to Trolls and Will o’ wisps and Changelings. We found this activity very useful to magpie and ‘steal’ effective vocabulary to then use in our report.

Throughout this unit, we focused on making sure our writing reflected that of a Year 6 child, with vocabulary choice and image being a main drive for our learning. In addition to this, we also studied how to vary our sentence structure using adverbial and prepositional phrases, subordination and authorial voice using the active and passive tone.

Once we had worked on developing and deepening these skills, we moved along our writing journey by drafting and editing our own imaginative report based on a creature of our choosing. Collaborative and shared writing really was a helpful technique here as we were able to make sure our writing was effective for an audience.

We had great fun illustrating and formatting our final piece of writing for the displays across the school and we are very proud that our displays are good examples for Year 6 children to see.

“I really enjoyed writing this report as you could try describe you creature and use your imagination and create whole new monster. The difference between the report we wrote in year 5 and the one we wrote in year 6 is that in year 6 we could use higher vocabulary and different sentence structure so it didn’t sound like a robot.”- Archie

 

“I really enjoyed writing a Spiderwick report and the special criteria we focused on was drawing in the readers and explaining the creature with good description and vocabulary. The difference between a year 5 report and a year 6 report is that we attempted to add passive sentences into our writing and use stronger vocabulary. Doing our report we first looked at a w.a.g.o.l.l, which were actual pages from the Spiderwick Chronicles. Our reports were based on a spiderwick creature created by us. It was a very fun subject to write about, and the style we wrote in was challenging.”- Arthur

 

We are explainers

Our teachers had realised that we loved the previous Spiderwick Unit of writing and asked us if we wanted to continue to explore and write about the world of Mythical creatures-which we most certainly did! Now, instead of informing our reader, we continued on our writing journey by becoming explainers through creating a ‘How to care for…’ guide.

We compared and contrasted a number of good explanation texts focusing on structure, language and author intent. This then gave us an effective success criteria to refer to throughout this unit of writing.

Here we also worked specifically on developing our range of punctuation for our Year 6 writing. This included doing skill work activities for the use of semi colons, colons and dashes and the subjunctive mood.

Using the shared text ‘The development of a Frog’, we all worked in collaboration with each other to produce a ‘group’ explanation text. Here we were given the opportunity to not only apply the skills we had learnt from this unit of writing, but our previous ones too- such as the use of modal verbs and specific technical vocabulary.

We then used our skills to produce our own explanation text. As we were really proud of our Spiderwick reports, we decided to create a ‘How to care for…’ guide for our own creature. This helped us to go deeper as writers as we got to use the same information but for a different purpose.

“Writing the Spiderwick ‘How to care’ was very exciting and enjoyable, even more so creating your wild Spiderwick creature and reading it! Next time I think I could of expanded on passive and active voice on my text, but I’m still proud of it because our criteria was colons, semi colons, and passive and active voice and I did very well with the punctuation for semi colons and colons. The good ones (a WAGOLL, what a good one looks like) was informing and guiding, interesting and clear (we looked at an explanation text about a frog). We planned it and we prepared, so then we jumped straight into it. The product that we created was put into a booklet of all our texts, and all of them were packed with Year 6 criteria. SUCCESS!” -Emilia

We are poets

Continuing on from our main writing objective in Year 6 To convey meaning effectively to an audience, we wanted to show our appreciation and acknowledgement of War heroes as part of remembrance day 2021.

Using the works from a variety of famous war poets, we identified key common themes and how poetic devices were used for effect.

 

 

 

 

 

“At the start of this unit I really wanted improve my vocabulary, especially in poems, which was the main focus of the unit. One of the examples of a good war poem was one by Robert Graves, and we went through with highlighters looking for key pieces of a poem. We went through lots of different poems, observing they main components that they all had, which we would then use in our writing.” -Laurie

 

To develop our own skills of writing with figurative language, we adapted some original war poems to help us make our writing imaginative and unique.

 

We made sure we used lots of opportunities to peer assess with each other to ensure the impact on the audience was effective.

Through empathising with the soldiers’ situations in the war, we wrote some stunningly thought-provoking poems using metaphors, similes, personification, alliteration and onomatopoeia. All staff, including the Year 6 team, were delighted with our completed pieces.

“In this unit I wanted to learn about what vocabulary they use and how it can touch the reader in an emotional way. I also wanted to read about some soldiers that actually fought in the War who then wrote about their experience! Our special criteria was to up level our vocabulary and make more realistic scenes. Our WAGOLL in this unit was looking at different types of writing in poems and how they choose vocabulary and word choices. I already knew that some poems had rhyming couplets at the end of each line but liked the fact that we got to write a free verse of our choice. My end product was that I learnt out how to make a good World War 1 poem with vocabulary and I am very pleased with it. ” -Etta