National Poetry Day - October 2023

We were lucky enough to have some children from Year 6 come and read us some poetry to celebrate National Poetry Day. They read us a selection of poems and we enjoyed learning more. We listened carefully to hear the rhyming patterns! 

We are spending a week studying different examples of Free Verse poetry and have been reading a range of different poems, such as 'Thought Machine' and 'Louder!' and thinking about what we like or dislike about these examples. We have learnt that Free Verse poetry has no specific structure and we have enjoyed experimenting with our poetry performances, using the visual clues within the poem. We rehearsed and performed one of these Free Verse poems to the rest of the class and then moved on to comparing different poems. We will be writing and performing our own poems in the next couple of days! 

The second text that we are studying in English this year is 'Where the Poppies now Grow', which is a lovely story about two children who grow up together and become soldiers in World War One. Our writing focus is letters and we are going to be writing these to soldiers as if we were living in 1914. We have been concentrating on writing using the past tense of verbs, as we know that WW1 has happened in the past. We have been learning to write descriptively in the past tense, using our knowledge of adjectives and description from our previous learning on The Rainbow Fish! 

We continue to focus on writing descriptively in the past tense this week, with a particular focus on our punctuation and grammar. We have been identifying when capital letters and full stops are used and have been working hard on including these within our own writing. We have also studied question marks and exclamation marks and have been writing questions we would like to ask Ben and Ray about their time in World War One and beyond. 

This week, we have focused on varying our sentence openers and have been studying the features of a letter too. We have worked hard to identify each feature and will be planning to include these in our own letters. We have also used books and the internet to research facts about World War One, which will help us with our writing next week! 

We have now completed our first Gold Write, which was an independent piece of writing - a letter home from the perspective of a soldier. We had to include everything we have learnt about this half term and in previous years and combine it all together. We did this so well! I am really impressed with the quality of the work produced, and so was Mrs Dunn (see this week’s newsletter ). Our work is displayed in our classroom because we are so proud of it. Well done everyone! 

This week, we have read the story of 'The Rainbow Fish' and spent some time ensuring we understood the plot and the structure of the story. Then, we moved on to discussing more about adjectives and how these are used to describe. We created a list of different adjectives we could use to describe the Rainbow Fish and wrote our own descriptions independently. We also learnt about conjunctions this week and have been using these within our writing! Remember, it is super important to use capital letters, full stops and appropriate spacing between words when writing. We have also been practising our handwriting and letter formation and are becoming more accurate when using the line guide. 

This week, we have continued to focus on descriptions and studied conjunctions which we use to join our clauses together. We have also been practising noun phrases and using adjectives to describe different characters within the story and the setting too. We continue to practise our spellings, punctuation and presentation as well, as well as making time for lots of reading in class.