We have been reading books all about castles and have focused on non-fiction texts. We have learnt about different features of non-fiction writing, such as the contents, subheadings and glossary. We looked at a range of books and discussed how they were similar and different to our focus book. Some of these books were fiction and we identified how these are different to non-fiction. 

We have been learning all about adjectives in Rufford Class this week! We found out that adjectives are describing words and are used to add more detail. We created a list of adjectives that we could use to describe a castle and suggested words such as 'strong', 'hard', 'big' and 'tall' - some of the children wrote their own descriptive paragraphs using these words. Some children had to dig into the sand to find a word, read the word to the group and then decide whether it was an adjective or not. Have a look at some photos below.

This week we have been learning more about verbs and adverbs! We thought about examples of both and generated lots of ideas together. Then, we had a selection of words and we worked in groups to decide whether they were verbs or adverbs. Following this, we tried really hard to put them into a sentence and read our sentences out to the rest of the class, who had to put one hand up when they heard a verb and then a second hand up when they heard an adverb!

We have also learnt more about the five senses this week and have applied this to our Battle of Hastings topic - we have thought about the things we might see, smell, hear, feel and taste if we were a soldier in the middle of this battle. We wrote sentences or drew pictures to represent our ideas. 

Finally, this week we have been learning about the personal pronoun 'I' and have thought about how we need this when writing a diary. We wrote some sentences which included this pronoun and applied our knowledge of adjectives, verbs and adverbs to create some excellent ideas.

We have also been working super hard on our handwriting! Year 2 children have been learning more about joining letters and have practised some joins themselves, and Year 1 children have been able to form letters correctly and practise using the line guides.  

For our final week of learning this half term, we looked at an example of a diary entry and learnt how they are written. We highlighted the different features that we could spot and discussed all of the things we should see in a diary entry - the use of 'I', past tense, 'Dear Diary', discussion about feelings and lots of descriptive language, which we have already learnt all about! We then showed what we had learnt by writing our first 'Gold Write' of the year. Some of these pieces are displayed in our classroom on our 'Grand Designs' topic wall!