This week, we have started reading 'Dear Earth', which is about a girl who writes a letter to the Earth. We discussed what is similar between this book and others that we have read, suggesting ideas such as: 

- The Great Kapok Tree and Dear Earth are both about saving the environment. 

- Flotsam is a picture book and Dear Earth has words. 

- Both Rainbow Fish and Dear Earth involve sea creatures. 

- The Great Kapok Tree and Dear Earth both mention the rainforest. 

These are just some examples of the super ideas we came up with!

We then discussed how we will be writing our own non-chronological reports, which contain factual information about sea creatures. We started looking at a variety of books about sea creatures and used our retrieval skills to find some interesting facts about them. Have a look at some of what we found out below! 

We have been focusing on our subheadings this week, identifying the areas we are interested in and completing research around our animals. We are learning about sharks, crabs, orcas and jellyfish to name a few! We have researched and written our subheadings ready to add some extra facts next week before typing up our reports. 

This week, we have started our learning focusing on a new text - 'Flotsam'. This is a super interesting book because it has no words! So this allows us to use our imaginations to create our own stories and ideas. We have begun by writing the opening to the story based on what we can see from the images in the first few pages. We learnt a lot about what 'flotsam' is and focused on this word before moving on to discussing adjectives in further detail. 

We have continued to look at the pages in this text and have been telling our own story based on what we can see. We discussed how the boy in the pictures had found an underwater camera and studied the pictures that were on there - we saw a shell village on the back of a turtle and a robot fish to name a few! We discussed the parts of the pictures that we liked the best and used sentence starters such as 'I observe' and 'I wonder' to focus our descriptions. We continue to develop our use of adjectives and have been discussing adverbs too this week. 

This week, we have been applying all of our learning to our Gold Writes, where we focused on writing narratives based on the book 'Flotsam'. Then, we edited our own work by reading back through it and noticing any errors, adding extra information or using synonyms for words. Finally, we performed our writing to a group, thinking about using a clear voice and expression to make the stories come to life!