12.03.24 Oobleck Phonics 

After a gloopy few sessions of trial and error, we finally made our own Oobleck. Today we rolled up our sleeves and got to work practising our spellings and our letter formation. 

04.03.24 Buzzer Round VIPERS

To test our knowledge and understanding of our class novel, we played a buzzer round game with questions based on Fantastic Mr Fox. We focused on retrieving information from the text to support our answers and gain a chance of winning a prize from the prize box. 

20.02.24 Whole Class Storyboard 
We used our retrieval skills and retold the story of Fantastic Mr Fox so far. In groups we each retold one part of the story through pictures and a short piece of writing. We included key vocabulary, narrative features, speech dialogue and reporting clauses to support our writing. To complete the lesson we read through each part in a sequence. 

06.02.24 Building Tension

We are learning how the author builds tension. As we dive deeper into the our class novel, Fantastic Mr Fox, we have started to identify some key features used by Roald Dahl to build tension and keep the story in suspense. We worked together today to gather our ideas and record some of these features in a mind map. 

18.01.24 Phonics Fun

Our New SOTW is ‘th’. We made some ‘th’ words using playdough and built our fine motor skills while we were at it! We squashed, rolled and stretched the dough into letters to form our ‘th’ words and then challenged a partner to have a go at reading them. 

09.01.24 Fantastic Mr Fox

We used our investigative skills today as we worked collaboratively to move around the classroom and decipher clues leading us to our new class text. We had lots of fun using the magnifying glasses to read key vocabulary, and discuss different scenes and character's. After writing down our ideas and building a picture of the story, we discovered that our new novel is Fantastic Mr Fox!

30.12.23 Shared Writing 

After our fantastic trip to the pantomime to see Miss Muffet, we engaged in a shared writing activity to create a recount of our wonderful day. We worked in small groups to recount different parts of our day before coming together as a whole class to finalise our story board!

27.11.23 VIPERS

We engaged in a whole class talking and listening activity today to answer questions and discuss

Vocabulary, Inference, Predictions, Explanations, Retrieval and Summary

based on our class novel, ‘The Queen’s Token’. The activity helped us to gain a more meaningful understanding of the book and the ideas of the author. 

16.11.23 Problem Solving 

We created a story board of a familiar story today to help us to understand the structure of a recount. We chose to retell the story of Little Red Riding Hood through group work. Using our recount writing checklist helped us to include the key elements of recount in our story board such as the 5 W’s, Who, What, When , Where and Why. We were able to problem solve by recalling key events and creating the appropriate pictures to use in the story map. Afterwards, we created a dialogue to verbally retell the story!

13.11.23 VIPERS Retrieval and Inference

Having read the next few chapters of The Queen’s Token we used our retrieval skills today to answer questions based on the novel with the help of the rainbowing strategy. This allowed us to explore ideas together and then swap groups to expand on those ideas. We repeated these steps when thinking about the authors inference too, and we are beginning to notice that Pamela Field uses inference quite often to represent the feelings of key characters. 

06.11.23 VIPERS Retrieval and Inference
Today we started a new class novel called ‘The Queen’s Token’. Miss Gormley read the first chapter to us at the beginning of the day and it was our job to retrieve information from the text. We used rainbowing to answer questions and then shared our ideas across the class. We enjoyed thinking about the inference used by the author Pamela Field and we look forward to learning more about her story telling style. 

05.10.23 Shared Writing 

 We were super motivated during our writing lesson today as we engaged in a shared writing activity. We collaborated to write a set of instructions for chocolate apples. We used large sugar paper and markers to record our list ingredients amounts. Our knowledge of time connectives helped us to sequence the method so that we  knew exactly what to do. Then, it was time for chocolate!

02.10.23 VIPERS Retrieval and Inference

We engaged in a rainbowing activity today to help use to retrieve information from our class novel ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’. Working together helped us to share ideas and explore the authors inference based on different children’s thinking.

28.09.23 Modelled Writing 

Today we made top hats! Yum! We began our lesson with a discussion on the key features of instructional writing understand the structure of writing our own set of instructions. Miss Gormley modelled this for us on the board as we contributed some important features. After that, we used the instructions to make delicious top hats! It was great food for thought!

27.09.23 Punctuation and Grammar
We brought out our detective skills for a noun hunt today. Our task included hunting for nouns around the classroom. Making use of the interactive whiteboard helped us to distinguish proper nouns from common nouns. 

25.09.23 VIPERS Retrieval and Inference

Today we used the rainbowing strategy to retrieve information from George’s Marvellous Medicine and understand the authors use of inference. We had great fun working together and sharing our interesting ideas!

21.09.23 Instructional Writing 

Today we put our writing skills to good use and worked together to sequence a set of instructions. We were able to use our knowledge of key features such as a title, list of ingredients, a method and time connectives to order the instructions appropriately. Now to make George’s Marvellous Medicine!

14.09.23 Instructional Writing

We worked hard today during a group task to identify the key features of instructional writing. This will guide us in structuring our own writing in the coming weeks. 

13.09.23 Hot Seating

We had great fun getting into character today with a hot seating activity. We asked open ended questions based on our new class novel ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’ which allowed us to understand the thoughts and feelings of different characters. 

11.09.23 Phonics Fanatics!

We had a great start to the new term by using magnetic letters to revise common spelling patterns. We focused on satpin words to practice blending different sounds and letters, and create a wide range of words!