We have been reading the story 'The Gigantic Turnip' and had a great time acting out the story. Each of us took a role and eventually we managed to pull the turnip out of the ground, with the help of the little mouse! We had discussed what the book might be about and some of the characteristics of the text before reading it. We continued to make predictions throughout the story too. 

We then recapped on writing creatively and spent time generating creative ideas and finishing sentences in an imaginative way. The Year 2 children focused on suffixes this week and we used a range such as 'ment' and 'ful' within our writing, thinking carefully about the meaning and spelling. Can you think of any examples? 

As always, we have been completing lots of reading activities such as pre-reading questions, post-reading questions, summarising reading and individual and guided reading with an adult. We are super busy in Rufford Class! 

We followed on from this by learning more about how to plan our own piece of creative writing. We discussed what we needed to include and the story structure that we could remember from previous learning. We thought again about descriptive language and how we could make our stories really clear and interesting using different vocabulary. We then planned what our own creative write would be about. We had some super ideas from magic football boots to a trip to the beach! Finally, we wrote our creative pieces as our Gold Write task and created some wonderful stories.

We now turn our focus to a very different type of writing - non-chronological reports! We learnt a bit about these in September when we were learning about castles and could remember what the word 'chronological' means - well done! We were able to make comparisons between these types of reports and the non-fiction texts that we are reading from the library about plants. We discussed the features of a non-chronological report, such as the subheadings, the use of paragraphs and a picture along with a caption. 

We then focused in on grouping relevant information together to ensure that, when we write our own non-chronological reports, they have a clear structure and are educational to the reader. We decided on a title for one subheading, for example 'how do bees pollinate flowers?' and worked in small groups to research the facts surrounding our subheading. We were able to focus on finding specific information that related back to our subheading and ensure we were only providing specific, relevant information. 

Next, we moved on to researching information for our own non-chronological reports. To do this, we had to gain knowledge on how to take notes and how to navigate around the internet in order to find specific information. We have collected lots of facts about our chosen subject!

Finally, we worked in groups to use the computers to produce our own non-chronological reports. We had to apply all of the knowledge that we have gained over the course of this topic and also work as a team successfully. We also applied our knowledge of different ICT programs in order to complete our reports. They will be going on display in our classroom